At its annual WebexOne conference today, Cisco announced an ambitious new AI strategy aimed at improving communication and collaboration through its Webex video conferencing platform. This strategy positions Webex as a formidable competitor to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, all of which have also embraced AI features in recent months.
Enhancing Communication and Collaboration
Cisco’s new AI strategy combines real-time intelligence across text, audio, and video to address the everyday challenges faced by organizations during video conferences. This builds upon the initial AI updates to Webex in March, including meeting summarization.
The updates announced at WebexOne go even further, introducing new Real-Time Media Models (RMM) to enhance the audio and video experience. Additionally, an enhanced AI assistant will provide suggested responses and meeting summaries, enabling Webex to better support the hybrid workspace that has become the new normal.
Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco, explained the company’s focus: “We’re spending our engineering resources where we are really good, which is audio intelligence, video intelligence, and language intelligence.”
“The goal is to pull Cisco’s engineering resources together so that people can communicate with each other without friction or language barriers,” Patel said.
The core component of the updates is the new Webex AI Assistant. This assistant works across the entire Webex portfolio of services and offers automated support such as tone modification for message writing, suggested responses to received messages, and meeting summaries for late or absent participants.
“Imagine if I came 10 minutes late to a meeting,” Patel said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the system knows, and instead of interrupting the meeting, it gives me a summary of what transpired?”
This AI assistant feature is similar to those offered by Zoom, Otter.ai, and timeOS. The integration of AI into video collaboration tools has been a prevailing trend, with Microsoft Teams incorporating an AI copilot and Google integrating its Workspace AI with Meet.
Advancements in Audio and Video Quality
In addition to the AI assistant, Cisco is rolling out new AI-powered audio and video capabilities to improve communication quality, even in low bandwidth and high latency networks. The company has completely reimagined its audio and video codecs using AI, making them up to 16 times more efficient.
This advancement enables high-definition audio and video to be delivered with as little as 1/16 of the bandwidth normally required. It also allows for reconstructing dropped packets through generative AI, improving audio quality in high latency, and high packet loss environments, while simultaneously reducing storage costs for audio files.
“If you think about a contact center application where every single call gets recorded and stored, you will not be able to store [calls] for a fraction of the cost because you actually need less storage,” Patel explained.
Cisco’s commitment to enhancing AI-powered capabilities for Webex does not stop there. Patel emphasized that users should expect continuous improvement and expansion of AI use cases, ultimately providing every user with an assistant that can perform tasks they were not able to do before, simplifying communication and reducing distances.
