Cisco Webex offers clever work at home tools

Cisco’s Webex will let users address a group remotely person-by-person, and will give home workers insights about their work habits.

Cisco Webex real time translation. Click on image to enlarge.

Communications giant Cisco wants to make life easier for those of us who will continue to work from home, as part of a post-pandemic, permanent hybrid workforce.

The company this week is hosting its annual Cisco Live event online, emphasising the future of communications with a hybrid workforce, and how this will be turbocharged by 5G.

While internet use has spiked by 25-45 per cent during the pandemic, Cisco says this is a fraction of what’s to come in the 5G era, with an estimated 29.3 billion devices expected online by 2023.

Jeetu Patel, senior vice president & general manager, security and collaboration division at Cisco

Cisco says it will roll out new tools in its Webex communications platform to help workers cope with their home-based working environment.

Speaking to The Australian, Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager, security and collaboration division at Cisco, said the company had added about 400 new features to Webex since September last year. Cisco was now implementing new features around employee wellbeing.

“You can’t talk about productivity without also thinking about employee wellbeing,” Mr Patel told The Australian. “If you ignore wellbeing, you can‘t have sustained productivity in the workforce.”

Cisco’s ‘people insights’ show how you are doing as an individual or as a team in a company within the WebEx environment. He said personal insights are sent to you alone, and not your boss or organisation.

“It provides you with some guidance so that you don‘t overwork yourself in some ways”, he said.

“We‘re going to honour and maintain privacy in a very obsessive way.”

Webex work-life balance metrics. Click on image to enlarge.

He offered examples. In one scenario, you might tell Webex your working hours are 8am to 5pm, but Webex tells you that 30 per cent of your meeting times are outside working hours.

In another scenario, it might say that over the past two days, you’ve been late by more than five minutes to online meetings on 14 out of 17 occasions. That information would come to you and no one else.

In a third where you manage a team of four men and two women, it might tell there is an unconscious bias creeping in where you see the men more often than the women. “It might not necessarily be something that I am doing intentionally,” he said.

He said Webex will help you nurture the relationships you might have in your organisation and keep you aware of how productive you might be.

In a large organisation you might define the 25 people you need to stay closely in contact with. Webex will track that for you and let you know. “If I‘m not in contact with them for a while, the system will prompt me,” Mr Patel said.

Adding working hours to Webex. Click on image to enlarge.

“Our goal is, can we get three billion digital workers on the planet to have equal access to opportunity regardless of the geography, regardless of the language preference, regardless of their personality type, and regardless of the tech proficiency level?

“We believe it‘s going to be completely game changing; we’re just getting started. Over the course of the past couple years, we’ve spent over a billion dollars on AI technology that we’ve invested in.”

Other recent Webex features include real time speech to text closed captions during calls. This has been possible due to Cisco’s acquisition of voice-focused AI company Voicea in 2019.

Cisco’s intention now was to provide those captions translated into 108 languages – with English 208 languages.

During a call, you’ll be able to highlight paragraphs of a transcription which will then become your meeting notes.

New Webex grid view. Click on image to enlarge.

Mr Patel said Cisco planned to roll out another feature before year’s end – the ability to address a group of people in a room individually when calling in remotely. This would be possible with its new ‘camera intelligence’ that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“You can detect how many people there are in a room, zoom into those people and make an individual box for each one of those people.

“So if there were three people sitting where you are right now in your office, I would see three boxes rather than one. I would zoom into every single one of those people and be able to see their facial expressions, I will be able to see their body language, and be able to feel like I‘m engaging better with them.”

He said capabilities like these were essential if you wanted a level playing field between those physically in an office and those working at home. This scenario would be achieved using a Webex conference system.