Cisco announced plans Thursday to bring voice control to its Cisco Spark Room series hardware, the first step in a larger plan to make an AI-powered meeting assistant available across all Cisco hardware. The Cisco Spark Assistant uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand what a person wants by harnessing technology from MindMeld, the AI startup Cisco acquired in May for $125 million.
The assistant will be available in early 2018, first packaged with the Cisco Spark Room 70. With a 70-inch LED screen, the single Room 70 costs $55,900 without a monthly subscription, while a dual Room 70 can be had for $79,900.
The Room 70 follows the release earlier this year of the Spark Room 55, a whiteboard with a 55-inch LED screen that goes for about $5,000.
Initial deployment of Cisco Spark Assistant will include things like the ability to start and end meetings, make calls, and control Cisco endpoints.
Future features will enable users to find and reserve meeting rooms, record meetings, or (presumably with more MindMeld conversational AI knowledge) take meeting notes and send attendees highlights. When someone says “Hey Spark, start the meeting,” the assistant will use facial recognition to understand who is in attendance, as well as confirming things like calendar time and all the employees invited to attend the meeting.
The goal over time is to make these assistants and bots a regular part of meetings, using AI and data to answer questions about things like business performance or other metrics. By ruling the meeting room, Cisco intends to be a dominant force in the AI-driven workplace of the future, Jason Goecke, the VP leading the Spark Platform, said in a blog post.
“At first, AI meeting bots will reduce the cognitive load we put into the mechanics of being in a meeting. People will be able to focus on what’s important: being in the meeting,” said Cisco IoT general manager Rowan Trollope in a Chatbots Magazine post. “But that’s just the start. Meeting bots will begin to do things for us that we can’t do ourselves. They will eventually anticipate our needs and understand interpersonal and even company-wide dynamics.”
This week’s announcement continues the expansion of Cisco Spark platform services, which now include a line of video and voice meeting hardware, as well as the Cisco Spark chat app.
The promise of an intuitive meeting assistant from Cisco makes the Room 70 one of the first whiteboards to include voice control, though its price tag is higher than that of most other whiteboard for enterprise collaborations on the market today.
And companies are increasingly targeting enterprise customers with tools for presentations, whiteboard brainstorms, and video conferences.
Ricoh’s whiteboard has used IBM Watson for voice commands for about a year.
Google’s Jamboard does not use Google Assistant but is bundled with G Suite apps and starts at around $5,000. Microsoft’s Surface Tab doesn’t work with Cortana but has access to things like Office and Azure Cloud. The Surface Tab is available in 55-inch and 84-inch models, and the larger of the two can cost more than $30,000.
What makes Cisco Spark Assistant so interesting in a field now populated by Microsoft, Facebook, and Slack is its many hardware endpoints already established in conference rooms around the world.
