Cisco Spark Assistant

Cisco launches, Cisco Spark Assistant, the world’s first AI powered voice assistant to build for meetings and collaboration, to improve and simplify the meeting experience with voice commands.

“The capabilities supported by voice assistants are defining the winners and losers in the smartphone space, in the connected device space in your home,” Cisco’s Timothy Tuttle. Cisco believes the same thing will happen in the enterprise space, and the first place it’s going to happen is around meetings and collaboration.

Cisco’s aim isn’t to replace existing voice assistants, but instead bring the technology found within Amazon Echo and Google Home to the world of business, changing the boardroom completely.

The Spark Assistant available to a small group of customers using select features. The assistant developed at Cisco’s acquisition of MindMeld, an advanced AI platform powering a new generation of intelligent conversational interfaces.

Spark Intelligent Proximity

The Spark Assistant trigger by the phrase, “Hey Spark,” then give a command. The assistant also takes advantage of Spark Intelligent Proximity.

Proximity can help users securely and quickly move through a meeting. However, an employee could join their meeting via the Spark Assistant without authenticate with the shared meeting room device.

Spark Assistant will only offer access to shared resources until user is verified with Intelligent Proximity. Tuttle said, Spark Assistant is “laser focused” on collaboration functionality.

“We are not going down the path of trying to make a general purpose, consumer assistant,” he said. “If user want to ask about the weather or stock prices, everyone has one in their pocket already that will do a decent job of that.”

The assistant available on Cisco Spark Room Series endpoints and also available on all of Cisco’s conference room devices, as well as mobile and desktop clients.

More information: [Spark Assistant]