Cisco Spark Just Got Smarter: Introducing the New Spark Assistant

Cisco takes their Smart Assistant strategy to school

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Collaboration

Published: November 21, 2017

Rebekah Carter - Writer

Rebekah Carter

Virtual Assistants have emerged as an almost natural part of our everyday life today. Spend enough time with a Google Home, Amazon Echo, or Microsoft Cortana product in your home, and speaking to a digital helper will quickly become something that you take for granted.

These easy-to-use, yet highly advanced pieces of technology have changed the way we interact with technology on a fundamental level. We use them to check the weather forecast, order food, and even play music. So, what happens if you bring that level of convenient functionality with you into the workplace? That’s a question that Cisco could be answering soon, with the delivery of their new “Cisco Spark Assistant”.

Your New Virtual Office Assistant

Imagine a world where you don’t have to worry about writing down notes during a meeting so that you can type up a report a couple of hours later, or finding a room to hold a conference with a huge, important client. A virtual assistant, such as the new solution offered by Cisco, could simplify the meeting process for you, all the way from arranging the call, to ensuring that you have the right data compiled in your files by the time you sign off for the day.

Cisco Spark Assistant is the only enterprise-ready voice assistant to hit the market up to now, and it’s already making some waves in the business space. Designed specifically to simplify your meetings, the Spark Assistant comes from Cisco’s recent acquisition of the AI company MindMeld, which allowed them to develop a new deep-domain conversational machine learning algorithm.

Using MindMeld’s expertise, Cisco could enable cognitive solutions in the existing Cisco Spark platform, to make it an all-around AI-powered strategy for collaboration. According to the brand, the solution will help you to focus before, during, and after a meeting, so you can start meetings, call co-workers, navigate Spark devices and more within seconds.

Addressing the Future of Virtual Assistants with Cisco

The Cisco Spark Assistant will be rolled out in phases, to help the company continuously make improvements based on customer feedback. The idea, as with any AI strategy, is to allow the program to learn and become more intuitive with time so that it gradually grows more intuitive, and accurate.

To some degree, this virtual assistant solution demonstrates Cisco’s vision of the future, and what meetings can look like when AI enters the space. Cisco has already laid out a roadmap of development with 5 initial levels:

  1. Command and Control: Where you can join a meeting, and manage aspects of that meeting using your virtual assistant (available soon)
  2. Natural Language Understanding: Where bots can recognise and respond to context to help with meeting management (2018-2019)
  3. Domain Expertise and Semantic Understanding: Where AI can help to summary key topics in a meeting for convenience and ease-of-use (2019-2020)
  4. Intelligent Team Member: Where AI can understand the room, and anticipate user needs and group dynamics, to better help the team (2021-2024)
  5. Strategic and Team Analysis: Where AI understands and responds to company goals, making suggestions based on worker skillsets (2022-2027)

The Cisco Spark Assistant is just the next step on this pathway of innovation, and insight into where the Spark platform his heading in the coming years. Cisco believes that if AI can integrate fully into the meeting experience, their partners will have a better opportunity to take advantage of truly innovative technology.

The Cisco Vision

Ultimately, with the Cisco Spark Virtual Assistant, the company wants to do a lot more than simply help customers to join and leave meetings with ease. They predict that the solution will become a fully-fledged part of the team, capable of booking rooms on an executive’s behalf, helping them share screens, record meetings, and find relevant documents as quickly and effectively as possible.

In the future, the Spark Assistant may even be able to learn from business calendars and company directories, so that the system can offer up useful information depending on the context of a meeting. If you thought a virtual office assistant was exciting, Cisco promises that this is just the beginning.

 

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