According to a recent research, the adoption of video conferencing is expected to grow by 20% by 2022, reaching $41 billion market value. This will make video communication the second most widely used channel after voice, alongside unified messaging and email. But while demand for video collaboration is growing, traditional video conferencing is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Gone are the days when video conferencing was only used in large boardrooms for formal presentations and meetings.
Today’s businesses are shifting their focus to create a flexible working environment, which includes huddle rooms and multi-purpose breakout areas that are equipped with video devices. Despite this, it is estimated that only a small percentage of the estimated 32.4 million huddle rooms available globally are video‑enabled.
With almost 50% of the UK workforce expected to work remotely in the next couple of years, video enabled communication will become a critical component of the productivity strategy for every organisation. But video enabling every room is only the first step to boosting productivity. As office spaces are evolving, collaboration technology is evolving too. One of the key innovations in this space is video conferencing powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
How AI is transforming video conferencing
Advancements in AI can dramatically improve the user experience and drive incremental efficiencies by helping automate time-consuming collaboration tasks. In fact, AI can drive innovation in three key areas: natural language processing, meeting room analytics, and computer vision.
Natural language processing: Giving everyone a voice
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Anne Marie Ginn[/caption]
Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be used to improve video conferencing in a number of ways: from enabling the automated transcription of the meeting, through to sharing actions and notes, and translating the conversation into different languages. Natural language processing, combined with AI, can also enable virtual assistants and chatbots to start, join, and leave meetings through voice command.
There are further applications too - AI combined with NLP, will enable better audio quality by automatically suppressing echo and minimising background noise. For example, if someone happened to be eating a packet of crisps in a meeting, the technology is intelligent enough to muffle this background noise. This, coupled with evolving techniques such as automatic levelling and beamforming, will make everyone in the meeting easy to hear and understand.
Meeting room analytics: Using AI to drive productivity
In the future AI will be used to interact with users both inside and outside of the meeting room to drive productivity. In fact, AI-driven devices can make conference rooms smarter and your meetings better in ways that you may have never imagined. For instance, AI can drive significant improvements in video conferencing by enabling businesses to manage meetings more effectively and drive efficiency by automating simple tasks such as rescheduling calls and sending important notifications. This includes the ability to find and book available rooms, suggest relevant documents ahead of time, enable screen sharing and notify participants of changes in pre-scheduled meetings.
