Beginning this summer, Cisco’s Webex will start giving insights for video calls to some users for teams, organizations and individuals. The insights will include information like how often you have your video on, how many times you are on time and the people you speak to frequently. Cisco’s Veep, Jeetu Patel, spoke to VentureBeat about this on a phone interview.
The goal, he said, is to make video calls better for people who have to operate in the twilight world between in-person office meetings and virtual meetings from home.
Tricky part
Patel said that the challenge now is considering what information is okay for an individual to know, while not making it look like Webex is flagging people who are frequently late to meetings. For instance, he continued, if you do 12 meetings in a day and in six of those, there were four people or less and you spoke 90% of the time.
That is not something you want a boss to see but it is a good thing for individuals to have, so they can think ‘I should probably do a better job listening.’
Patel said that privacy on this front is on an individual rather than organization level.
What’s next?
In recent months, Webex has introduced several new features. Some of them are powered by AI, changing how people share information in a video call.
To this AI end, Patel said that the company has invested about a billion dollars or so in the last couple of years.
Gesture recognition is one such advancement. Now, people can raise their hands or give a thumbs up or thumbs down to ask for permission to speak or give feedback. Other features are on their way and will include even more functionality.
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