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With MindMeld technology, the Cisco Spark Assistant brings a conversational AI experience to the enterprise

Beijing, November 3, 2017 - Speech assistants based on artificial intelligence (AI) are changing our way of life. Hundreds of millions of users frequently use voice assistants to view the weather, set alarms, or gain navigation. However, virtual assistants have not been applied to work until now. At today's Cisco Global Partner Summit, Cisco announced the release of Cisco Spark ™ Assistant, the world's first conference voice assistant for the business. It will be the first to be used in the Cisco Spark Room portfolio, including the new Cisco Spark Room 70 flagship today.

The Cisco Spark Assistant is the latest innovation based on the Cisco Spark platform. Unlike general-purpose voice assistants, the Cisco Spark Assistant focuses on enabling users to enjoy a smoother meeting experience.

Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of applications at Cisco, said: "AI robotics will be integrated into the workforce in the coming years, and as they become operational, employees will be able to get out of tedious meeting settings And other logistics to move to more creative work.With artificial intelligence, Cisco Spark represents the future direction of the conference and our partners will achieve great results by helping customers take advantage of this disruptive technology. Opportunity. "

Cisco will introduce the Cisco Spark Assistant in phases starting early next year. In the first phase, a small number of customers will use some of their features.

Here are the features you'll be able to use in the first phase:

• Start a meeting directly without typing or dialing:

o "Hey, Spark. Join the meeting."    

o "Hey, Spark. I want to start a conference."    

o "Hey, Spark. Let's get started."

• Easily dial into your own Cisco WebEx personal meeting room or colleague's meeting room:    

o "Hey, Spark. Dial in to my meeting room."    

o "Hey, Spark. Dial into Victor's personal meeting room."    

o "Hey, Spark. Dial into Michael's meeting room."  

• Quickly call members of the organization without having to use the finger keys:    

o "Hey, Spark. Call Sydney."  

• Easy control of your Cisco Spark terminal equipment without getting up:    

o "Hey, Spark. Finish the meeting."

The Cisco Spark Assistant will be smarter based on feedback from the trial. In the end, it will be able to do more. For example, it will be able to assign tasks or create meeting summaries.  

We know that voice assistants need to be able to meet the needs in the right way, and really help keep the meeting going. Each time you say "Hey, Spark," the device response needs to be lightning fast and accurate. To ensure that this goal is achieved, we have adopted the following technologies in the Cisco Spark Assistant:  

• Machine Learning Technology from MindMeld, a company Cisco acquired earlier this year  

Voice recognition technology  

• Natural language understanding  

Q & A  

Dialog management  

With up to 50 billion minutes of customer service per year, Cisco equipment has given us a wealth of experience in the conference space. By making effective use of this accumulation, we further optimized the artificial intelligence for meeting rooms.  

Will be applied in the entire product portfolio, the first in the new Spark Room 70 available  We will be the first to offer the Cisco Spark Assistant on the new Cisco Spark Room 70, and the Cisco Spark Room 70 replaces the MX800, one of our best-selling video systems. As the Cisco Spark Assistant gradually improves and introduces more features, it will appear on all Cisco Spark clients and hardware devices.  

As part of the Cisco Spark Room Series, the Cisco Spark Room 70 includes the following features:  

- 70-inch 4K screen. We offer both single and dual screen models.  

- Award-winning and beautiful industrial design, as well as excellent audio and video playback capabilities.  

- Four 5k camera. In contrast to the MX800, we doubled the number of cameras in just half the space. One of the cameras always captures the entire room, supports smart framing, and displays the best room panorama in a quick and user-friendly way. In addition, these cameras also feature face recognition and counting.  

- You can register this system locally or on Cisco Spark through the Cisco Collaboration Cloud.  

With the NVIDIA Jetson platform at its core, our engineers are able to use artificial intelligence to build all-intelligent and intelligent capabilities.  

Spark Assistant takes full advantage of our industry-first technology in the conference room terminal area, including Intelligent Proximity, speaker tracking, and real-time face recognition. These technologies enable the Spark Assistant to detect changes in the environment around him, hear the sounds around him, and thus know who entered or left the conference room, and who is speaking.  

Support the introduction  

"As Cisco continues to innovate its entire collaborative product portfolio, its tireless efforts have had a significant and positive impact on the growth of the WWT collaboration business, and the Cisco Spark Assistants bring a richer room experience that enables WWT to take full advantage of its Extensive software and application development capabilities tailor-made for enterprise applications and use cases Cisco has effectively integrated its collaborative product portfolio in the new Cisco Spark Room 70 so that we can continue to bring customers more native or cloud deployment models s Choice.  

--Joe Berger, Director, Collaboration, World Wide Technology (WWT)  

"With the Artificial Intelligence capabilities of the Cisco Spark Assistant, we can optimize our meeting experience to help our customers use our meeting rooms efficiently and effectively, and now we are able to provide voice-activated technology to our corporate customers to dramatically improve their meeting experience." This voice-activated technology is compatible with many The voice-activated technologies consumers use at home are similar, and with Cisco Spark Room 70 products, we can take advantage of Cisco video devices and Spark-enabled devices to help customers simplify the collaborative experience as Cisco continues to innovate and develop these integrated Hardware and software solutions, we will further enhance our relationship with business decision makers. "  

--Jim de Poortere, CEO of Viju