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You may want to grab a bag of popcorn to go with that all-hands video call. Cisco and Zoom have both unveiled AI-driven “cinematic meeting” technologies intended to make work gatherings more entertaining. It may not feel exactly like going to the movies, but at least it won’t feel like a timeshare presentation.
Zoom’s Intelligent Director feature has already rolled out to users in beta; Cisco’s RoomOS Cinematic Meetings tool is expected in December. The cinematic meetings are intended to keep people’s attention with changing angles and perspectives.
A whole new world. Both the Zoom and Cisco products can be seen as a reaction to the new realities of hybrid work made commonplace by the pandemic.
“As more and more people have gone into the office, we have more and more situations where it’s no longer the nice Hollywood Squares layout—everybody in their own window,” Technalysis analyst Bob O’Donnell told TechTarget. “There’s the big room, and that room experience is not good.”
Fletcher Previn, Cisco’s CIO and someone with a bit of experience in show business, told IT Brew that a two-hour meeting leaves people tired, while a two-hour movie tends not to.
“Why is it that a meeting is so much more mentally taxing?” Previn said. “One of the reasons is a completely static view of somebody for two hours; it’s not the way your brain actually normally processes a thing.”
A demo shown to the conference audience at Cisco Live in early June previewed meetings where the technology would follow speakers with facial and audio recognition. Zoom’s technology does not use facial recognition.
Lights, camera, TPS reports! Cisco EVP and General Manager of Security and Collaboration Business Units Jeetu Patel said his company’s meeting tool provides “a movie-like experience.” Putting that ideal into practice, however, will take hard work.
“This requires hardware devices across multiple locations that have GPUs that are of a certain capacity that can do computing; we’ve actually done some work to have sound and acoustics intelligence along with video intelligence tied together and have the right algorithms,” Patel said. “that’s hard stuff; it’s not easy, it’s computer science problems.”
Tech departments won’t have to worry about managing the meetings, Patel assured IT Brew. The AI is designed to handle video and audio decisions. All the IT side will have to do is get the app up and running for users.
“One of the things we tried to do with AI was build a ton of features that are invisible, because what you don’t want to do is increase the cognitive load for people,” Patel said.