Cisco Global Senior Vice President Jeetu Patel: Webex virtual experience is 10 times better than face-to-face experience!

[51CTO.com original article] Cisco recently organized a global media communication meeting. At the meeting, Jeetu Patel, global senior vice president and general manager of security and application business, announced that Cisco will acquire BabbleLabs and use its noise reduction and voice enhancement technology to further improve the Webex collaboration platform, ensuring that Cisco users can get an excellent video conferencing experience anywhere and on any device.

According to Jeetu Patel, the BabbleLabs team members are experts in sound, acoustics, voice and audio technology, and have been working on developing noise reduction and voice enhancement technology for audio and video calls. They have established machine learning algorithms and, through extensive training, have enabled machines to distinguish between human voices and unnecessary background noise. Jeetu Patel believes that this will greatly improve the user's online communication experience. "Some people may question whether there is a better experience than face-to-face communication with flesh-and-blood people? The answer is yes. After BabbleLabs joins Cisco, we hope to provide users with a virtual experience that is 10 times better than face-to-face communication."

New video conferencing experience adapted to the new normal of the epidemic

Why is Cisco so confident? This has to start with a survey. According to a Cisco global survey report on the future of work, 98% of employees said they were frustrated by interruptions in video conferences when working from home. Among the top five reasons, two are about background noise, which comes from other meeting participants or the background noise of the participants' own environment.

Imagine that during the 2020 epidemic, people working from home became the new normal. However, during a video conference, if the background is the sound of your neighbor's renovation or the sound of children playing, it will make people feel a little embarrassed and question the professionalism of the person on the other end of the video.

The important value of BabbleLabs to Cisco is that they can provide excellent noise reduction solutions, which can not only distinguish between voice and background noise, eliminate background noise in real time, but also actively amplify the voice of the video subject, enhance voice effects and improve communication quality. In this way, Webex Meetings users can ensure smooth video images, clearer sound, and almost no background noise, no matter where they are and how they connect to the Webex application (through a conference room or mobile device). The first-class audio experience can make users more willing to communicate online.

It is worth mentioning that these noise reduction effects can be achieved 100% locally on the device rather than through the cloud. This way, users will not be at risk of privacy leakage, and security and privacy will be higher.

Webex User Experience Continues to Improve

Jeetu Patel said that Cisco has been continuously improving the user experience of Webex, and it is foreseeable that with the addition of BabbleLabs, Webex will take another big step forward.

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The reporter learned that in the past few months, Webex Meetings has gradually added the functions of background blur and background replacement, and improved the functions of high-quality real-time subtitles and meeting recording. These are all functions based on the embedded implementation of the system. Jeetu Patel specifically mentioned the real-time transcription function. When users are in a meeting, they do not need to spend their energy on recording meeting minutes, but concentrate on the meeting. Cisco uses machine learning functions to not only provide customers with accurate meeting minutes, but also mark important information in the transcription. Not only that, the Webex Board "whiteboard" function is also very popular with users. Unlike the use of physical whiteboards in offline face-to-face meetings, people often choose to take pictures of the whiteboards in order to save information in time when using physical whiteboards, and then call out the photos at the next meeting. The experience of using the Webex Board digital whiteboard is better. What the participants have written is left on the digital whiteboard, and they can see it on the computer at the next meeting. "The digital whiteboard can help users brainstorm and collide with ideas in real time without being limited by physical space. This is one of the advantages of Webex over face-to-face experience."

As a world-renowned network manufacturer, Cisco Webex's network optimization is even more commendable. In video conferences, due to different user network environments, it is sometimes inevitable that the connection is not ideal. Cisco uses new technologies to compensate for the shortcomings of the network environment. Once the packet loss rate exceeds 50% during the transmission process, the system will automatically compensate, and will not cause any impact on the sound quality and video to the participants.

"The reason why Cisco has invested so much R&D energy in the field of Webex video conferencing is that it considers that in the post-epidemic era, people will face tremendous pressure psychologically and in all aspects of work and life. Some people work from home, but due to poor network environment or noisy home, they have to go outside to find a venue to connect to the video conference." Jeetu Patel said that if Cisco can make some changes to reduce the pressure people face when working from home, and make the process of working from home more pleasant and efficient, even better than in the office, this is undoubtedly Cisco's contribution to society. "Our purpose is to make products easier to use, and through continuous enhancement of new technologies, we will continue to simplify the product experience, allowing users to focus more on the conversation itself and make communication and interaction more efficient. If we can help hundreds of millions of users change the way they work, it will also make a great contribution to the global GDP. This is Cisco's overall idea of ​​continuously optimizing Webex."

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