RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Cisco is adding the capability of real-time translation from English to 108 additional languages, including Afrikaans, Armenian, Malay, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Zulu, to its Webex conferencing suite.
The company announced this feature Tuesday and released an unlisted YouTube video tutorial for how the pilot project will work and what current users will need to do in order to set up this feature on the collaboration platform.
“Users can create their own personalized Webex meeting experience by quickly and easily self-selecting the language of their choice from the most commonly used languages, such as Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish, as well as more localized languages such as Danish, Hindi, Malay, Turkish and Vietnamese,” Cisco explained. “Eliminating language barriers is a key step to enabling a truly global, hybrid workforce.”
The competition
Two of Cisco’s big conference competitors are also attacking the language barrier.
Zoom recently provided guidance to meeting facilitators and organizers on how to incorporate and include interpreters in their meetings or webinars. According to Zoom, the host starts the interpretation feature, allowing the interpreters to provide their own audio channels for the language into which they are translating, and attendees can then set their audio to that channel. Recordings would only include the original audio, not the translations, and language interpretation cannot be used with Zoom’s Personal Meeting ID.
Microsoft provides a workaround for one-to-one conversations to be translated in real-time, using Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Translator, and the ability for inline message translation within multi-party Microsoft Teams meetings, with the translation feature integrated into the desktop and mobile experience for Teams users.
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According to Cisco, the company’s real-time language translation product offering will allow users to engage more fully in meetings and enable teams to communicate more effectively with each other. Ultimately, the goal is to expand opportunities for businesses to build more inclusive teams and a more inclusive workforce regardless of geography, the company said.
“The inclusive features of Webex help create a level playing field for users regardless of factors like language or geography. Enabling global Real-Time Translations is another step toward powering an Inclusive Future, and an important component of driving better communication and collaboration across teams,” said Jeetu Patel, SVP and GM Security and Applications at Cisco in the statement issued by the company. “AI technologies play an integral role in delivering the seamless collaboration, smart hybrid work and intelligent customer experiences that Cisco is known to deliver.”
Cisco based this feature release on research, including a recent report from Metrigy on intelligent virtual assistants that found that nearly 24 percent of participants have meetings that include non-English native speakers and of these, more than half have been using third-party services to translate meetings into other languages. The report found that businesses that use third-party translation services incur an average cost of $172 per meeting.
“Integrating intelligent virtual meeting assistants with language translation capabilities significantly reduces or even eliminates this cost entirely,” Cisco said.
According to the company, the future of work will involve a combination of remote and on-site interactions, known as hybrid-work. A few weeks ago CEO Chuck Robbins told analysts that people working from home are struggling and are not enjoying the experience.
“I think we sort of moved into that phase where people actually struggle mentally. People are – they’re not enjoying it,” Robbins said in an early February conference call with analysts originally held to discuss Cisco’s (Nasdaq: CSCO) latest earnings.
The expanded Real-Time Translation feature will be available in Webex as a preview starting later this month and will be orderable and generally available in May. Not all dialects will be included in the translation feature.
