Webex Finds Homemade Waffles Improve Team Collaboration

We’ve all been there. It’s midnight, you’re reading through the action items from the day’s meetings and suddenly you crave waffles. Not just any waffle, the homemade kind that’s still steaming and fresh off the waffle iron. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an on-demand assistant – one that could summarize your meeting notes while making waffles to your specifications? And after your midnight snack, they’d happily log (and slightly fudge) all those waffle and syrup calories into MyFitnessPal for you?

Well now you can have it all: Introducing Webex Personal Assistant as a Service. On demand. Anytime. Syrup covered waffles included.*

By now, you’ve realized you’re a bit hungrier now than when you started reading this post and also, that today is April 1st. April Fools’ aside, we’ve introduced some awesome features into Webex, including a digital assistant. While we can all dream about a personal waffle chef, these features will actually help improve team collaboration and productivity. To learn more, read the press release “AI Could Improve Your Next Meeting in Cisco Webex.”

Here’s a quick glance at the new cognitive collaboration capabilities we’ve announce for Cisco Webex:

Webex Assistant: Meet your digital chief of staff. Webex Assistant is the zero-touch, AI-powered assistant that helps remove mundane tasks like joining a meeting, calling colleagues and adding people to your call and if you join from a conference room, the device in the room knows who you are, and Webex Assistant will ask if you’d like to join your upcoming meeting.

People Insights: It’s never been easier to make a connection and have the relevant information you need to elevate the meeting experience. With people profiles at your fingertips, you can instantly learn more about your meeting participants with information like work history, blog posts, company details and links to social media accounts, right in your Webex Meetings.

Facial Recognition: With facial recognition in our Webex conferencing devices, you’ll know exactly who is in the room and who is speaking. Combine this feature with People Insight and you’ll not only know their name, but you’ll know their reporting structure, recent blogs and have quick links to their social media accounts.

So What’s Next?

This is just the beginning of our cognitive collaboration journey. At Cisco, we’re all about building bridges and that includes our products as well. In the old world, siloed products were a mainstay – today, if you own a siloed product, you’re missing out – big time. AI and machine learning are a game changer and a reason to invest in a collaboration platform. We’re continuing to evolve these use cases with cross-platform capability, so whether you’re collaborating on Webex Teams, in a huddle space with a Webex Device or on your laptop or mobile device in Webex Meetings, you’ll have the power of AI driving your collaboration experience.

To learn more about cognitive collaboration and how AI and machine learning are transforming the way we work, read the whitepaper: The Future of Collaboration: How AI is Transforming the Way We Work.

*This is not a real thing. Waffles are not included as part of Webex Assistant. Adding this disclaimer so our legal team doesn’t hunt me down and turn me into their personal waffle chef.