Cisco has unveiled new AI features for Webex, its business collaboration suite, but it faces stiff competition if it hopes to boost user uptake.
Cisco announced a slew of new AI capabilities for Webex, its business collaboration suite, at the company’s EMEA-facing conference Cisco Live 2024 in Amsterdam this week.
The AI assistant for Webex, first announced at WebexOne in October 2023, now offers a number of new features within the Webex App, including language translation per message or in real time, message summaries, meeting recaps, and message rewriting functionalities.
The meeting recap feature leverages generative AI to summarize the content of the meeting with hyperlinks to exactly when each item was discussed in the meeting.
These summaries are currently generated using a recording of the meeting, but this requirement will be removed very soon, according to Cisco.
Webex’s Rewrite Message feature allows users to rephrase, change the tone, and even translate an outbound message, tailoring the message according to the context and intended recipient.
Travis Pouliot, senior business development manager at Cisco, told ITPro the application of Rewrite Message he is most excited about lies outside instant messaging in the Webex App, but in Slido, Cisco’s polling and Q&A platform, where questions need to be carefully formed according to the audience..
“In Slido sometimes I don’t know how to articulate the question that I want to ask so we are using message rewrite to tailor that question” explained Pouliot.
“It’s about how to ask that question, especially if it’s a meeting with Javed or Jeetu (Javed Khan, SVP and general manager of Cisco Collaboration and Jeetu Patel EVP and general manager of Security & Collaboration).”
These products are now available in beta, and are expected to be rolled out to general availability in the first quarter of 2024.
Webex Control Hub, its administration and performance management platform, is also gaining Ai capabilities that will help admins troubleshoot network and application issues, as well as carry out configuration tasks.
