Turning Talk into Action: Bringing Voice Intelligence into Webex Meetings

The Power of Voice in the Workplace

Meetings are on my mind all the time. If I’m not having them, I’m thinking about how to make them better. In other words, I’m having meetings about meetings. And what I realize is that we spend a lot of time on the mundane tasks of meetings – the things that impede progress like note-taking. If we could automate these common meeting activities, it would free us up to focus on the important task of interacting with one another and making the best decisions – basically improving productivity.

Another challenge of meetings is how to extract the most value out of them – not just during, but especially after the meeting when we need to turn all that talk into real action. And I know this is important to you, too. In a recent TechValidate survey, 92% of Cisco Collaboration users agree that real-time transcription and search will make meetings more valuable. And more than half are already on board with a smarter way of working; they say a “virtual assistant that connects to my meeting, takes notes and action items and helps schedule a follow-up is important to the future of work.”

A Virtual Assistant for Webex Meetings

Having acquired Voicea last September, we’ve been fast at work integrating their automated speech recognition engine into Webex Meetings to make your meetings as frictionless and effective as possible.

So, today, we are pleased to introduce Cisco Webex Assistant for Webex Meetings – the first virtual in-meeting assistant for the enterprise, offering voice commands, transcriptions, closed captioning, note-taking and post-meeting features. Not only will these capabilities bring more focus and productivity to your meetings, but they will also enable a more accessible workplace for hearing-impaired participants or for non-native English speakers. The new voice intelligence features of Webex Meetings include:

Voice commands – invite Webex Assistant in your meetings to handle common meeting tasks: note-taking, follow-ups and more with just your voice;
Real-time transcriptions and closed captioning – once Webex Assistant is part of your meeting, toggle on the CC button to turn on closed captioning at the bottom of your meeting panel; the “Captions” tab on the right-hand panel will show you a transitory, running transcript of your meeting from which you can make highlights;
Highlights and notes – choose one of three ways to make a note or highlight, which will be available on your Webex Meetings web page after the meeting:
- “OK, Webex. Highlight that” or “Take a note”
- Speaking naturally with trigger words to automate an action: “Today’s agenda is,” “That’s the right decision,” “That’s an action item for Karen,” etc.
- Manually select a group of text and press the highlight button;
Recording transcripts – click the red button to record your entire meeting and enable a persistent transcript;
Speaker labeling – names are shown on notes, highlights and transcripts to let you know who said what;
Post-meeting experience – edit your highlights and transcripts, make your meeting assets available to the team, and send out action items to specific people or the whole team;
Cross-meeting keyword search – make better use of your recordings by finding that exact place in the meeting or across multiple meetings where something was discussed (less than 5% of recorded meetings are reviewed).

Watch the video to learn more about voice intelligence for Webex Meetings:

Cisco Advantages

These new voice intelligence features are delivered with the added power of Cisco. We offer the highest transcription accuracy with roughly 20% lower word error rate than other solutions on the market. And we’re using machine learning models to continue to build even greater accuracy based on Cisco data, never our customers’. In addition, Cisco’s security advantage is industry-leading. As a first-party provider of the transcription service, we keep your data safe from start to finish because it stays in the Cisco cloud. This is unlike other vendors who must send your meeting data to a third party to transcribe and then sent back, and security risks abound in that transmission. Like all Cisco products, we must strictly adhere to the Cisco Cloud security data governance, compliance, and e-discovery guidelines to give your data the highest level of integrity.

How to get Voice Intelligence into your Webex Meetings

Today, you already have recording transcripts as part of your regular Webex Meetings subscription. The full capabilities of Webex Assistant for Webex Meetings will be available for trials in March.