The move follows Cisco’s announcing an agreement to acquire IMImobile and intent to acquire Slido.
Cisco this week announced a wave of acquisitions and innovative Webex enhancements. The new features aim to help organizations better collaborate and transform their employee and customer experiences. The new additions include a series of three brand new devices for workers and the new Webex App Hub with integrations to simplify workflows. The announcements came during WebexOne, Cisco’s digital collaboration conference.
The “All New Webex”
Cisco’s announcements centered on what the company is calling “the all new WebEx”. This enhanced platform claims to allow users to “call, meet and message in one app.”
The new WebEx includes noise cancellation and speech enhancement to suppress the sound of loud typing or rustling papers. Transcriptions and closed captioning are now offered as a way to reduce the need for extensive note-taking. Transcripts are searchable, so team members who miss a meeting can quickly catch up.
Webex Assistant will create highlights and action items on verbal command. Users can also can also change the video layout with a simple slider control.
WebEx Huddle allows users to quickly call specific team members into a spontaneous meeting with a single click.
The company also announced future enhancements “coming soon.” These include in-meeting gestures (such as a thumbs up), real-time translation, meeting artifcacts sharing and accommodation for extra large meetings.
New Webex Contact Center
Cisco also announced major enhancements to the WebEx Contact Center. These include a next-generation microservices architecture that enables rapid feature innovation while open APIs allow for easy customization.
The Contact Center has new AI-powered voice and chat bots that can answer the easy questions and route the tricky ones to contact center agents. The cebter serves up rerouted queries with all the related background so customers won’t have to repeat themselves.
Three New Webex Devices
Cisco also announced three new WebEx devices. First up is the Webex Desk Camera which ships with what Cisco calls an “industry-first” AI feature. Then there is the Webex Desk Hub, which simplifies hotdesking. Finally, there is the Webex Desk, which has built-in intelligent features like noise cancellation and virtual backgrounds.
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