Cisco Spark Assistant

2017: Announcement

At the beginning of November, 2017 Cisco provided as the company claims, the voice assistant, the first in the market, for conferences. Service under the name Cisco Spark Assistant simplifies holding meetings and adds elements of artificial intelligence to corporate systems.

Cisco Spark Assistant is based on technologies of a startup MindMeld which Cisco purchased in 2017. In particular, useful to the new project of steel of the solution for recognition and understanding of the natural speech.

Spark Assistant will be able to authenticate users by means of recognition of the person or a voice. Cisco is going to expand possibilities of service, having added, in particular, different functions for holding actions, preparation and sending protocols of negotiations and also assistance in planning and drawing up schedules.

Cisco presented the voice assistant, the first at the market, for conferences

Thanks to integration into the equipment supporting Cisco Spark, the virtual assistant got access to the corresponding functions, including to Intelligent Proximity. It allows to connect the mobile phone to computers, having provided access to contacts, stories of calls and to functions of readdressing.

Spark Assistant can work both on desktop computers in conference rooms, and on mobile devices.

According to the technical director of division of Cisco Cognitive Collaboration Group Timothy Tuttle who based and headed MindMeld startup, the platforms similar to Amazon Alexa are more open allow third-party developers to create functions of a corporate class for voice assistants, however nobody started the intellectual assistant who would become really useful companies.

We are sure that Spark Assistant will become the first assistant who will be widely adopted in the corporate sector … A task of Spark Assistant is to include in a command of a virtual assistant which will help it to perform work — Tattl said.

According to it, by 2017 through voice assistants, like Amazon Alexa and Siri Apple, more than 50 billion requests are processed every month. By 2020 more than a half of all search queries will form by voice, he predicts.

Cisco is going to unroll Spark Assistant step by step, since first months 2018. At first will get access to service small customer groups. They will be able to use voice commands for start of conferences without text typing and calls, to be connected to personal  rooms  for Cisco WebEx conference communication, to call someone in the company and to control Spark devices.

Cisco calculates that during pilot tests the voice assistant will get a set of new features, will be able to study better and in general it will become more smart. Spark Assistant will be able to understand tasks of the company and skills of employees, to make recommendations on the basis of these data (for example, to invite to conferences of the worker who, according to the computer, will be useful).

The director of World Wide Tech IT company (the partner of Cisco) Joe Berger says that Spark Assistant, most likely, will be able to be connected to other business applications, including from Salesforce.com. The senior vice president and the head of department of Cisco Applications Group  Rowan Trollope confirmed this assumption with the fact that the company hopes for distribution of the voice assistant outside the products Cisco.

In plans of Cisco implementation of Spark Assistant in everything appears also the services connected with Spark are blown. At first the voice assistant will find application in new family of systems on the Nvidia Jetson platform.^[1]

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