Webex Assistant, Who Is in My Meeting?
The web conferencing feature arms race continues with Cisco’s announcements at Enterprise Connect 2019. Users will be delighted now, but long-term value will take a lot of effort.
The features that Cisco Collaboration unveiled at Enterprise Connect 2019 for Webex Meetings include:
- People Insights (trial available, general availability release in June)
- Webex Assistant features Proactive Join (general availability release in June) and First Match (generally available now)
- Facial recognition (US release target of June 2019)
People Insights provides just-in-time information on meeting participants from:
- Internal information sources
- Active Directory and Azure Active Directory
- HR Information Systems
- External information sources
- Blogs
- News sites
- Quotes
Our Take
Cisco Webex Meetings is a SoftwareReviews 2019 Gold Medalist in the Web Conferencing category, and it ranks first in the category for Product Strategy and Rate of Improvement. These features are another example of this excellence. The People Insight and facial recognition features sound particularly powerful, especially for people who are constantly meeting new people.
These features will be less powerful for those who mainly work with the same people. They’ll want information on projects and ongoing operations. This information usually exists in black holes with very little architecture or metadata (e.g. SharePoint, Dropbox). Structuring this information well enough for artificial intelligence to comb through will take a lot of effort.
These features should help IT departments to delight their users in the short term. Given Cisco’s reputation of innovating, I’m excited to see where these features go from here.
Want to Know More?
SoftwareReviews: Cisco Webex Meetings
SoftwareReviews: Web Conferencing Category
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