Tag Archive for: Cisco

Meeting Equity: It’s About More Than Technology

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There has been a steady climb in virtual meetings ever since 2020, and 38% of those are hybrid sessions that connect remote attendees with people in the room. For those larger gatherings, where it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, meeting equity should be top of mind when designing conference and collaboration spaces. 

Despite the prevalence of video meetings in our daily calendar, remote participants still feel left out. And worse, even in-room participants sometimes can’t get camera or microphone time because of where they’re sitting. This leaves everyone straining to see and hear what’s going on.

How can we use AV technology to better represent everyone in a meeting, regardless of where they are physically located?

Plenty of technology solutions promise to fix the audiovisual awkwardness between in-room participants and those on the far end of a call. But there’s more to the equation than just cameras and microphones. 

We need to consider how the entire room design contributes to meeting equity. Furniture layouts, room shape and size, wall coverings, windows, glass walls and other background materials affect not only the visual elements of a meeting, but also the acoustics and overall comfort and accessibility of a meeting space. 

To address the whole room and the whole meeting experience, PPI works closely with architects, interior designers and other trades to provide the best setup for connection and collaboration. Then, on top of these physical and architectural considerations, we add a layer of technology that further improves the hybrid meeting experience. 

We’re using a growing range of AI-driven hardware and software combinations that act as an automated production assistant for meetings. Tools such as Zoom’s Intelligent Director, Cisco’s Camera Intelligence, Poly Studio, Huddly Director, Q-Sys Intelligent Audio and Logitech’s Hybrid Meeting Equity Solutions can detect who is speaking and track the movement of participants, so no moment is lost. The software then crops and zooms in real-time to maintain the momentum of a conversation. 

New options are constantly evolving to provide a more comfortable hybrid meeting experience. PPI can help you look at the whole picture and envision a way to enhance physical spaces with smarter ways to virtually connect.

The Ultimate Teams Room is Not What You Might Expect 

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Your Microsoft Teams Rooms are getting smarter — and not just because of AI. An evolving partnership with Cisco is adding more capabilities on both the front-end and back-end of Teams Rooms integrations.

There’s no question Teams is gaining ground in enterprise applications – as of last year, when the Cisco partnership was announced, Microsoft counted more than half a million Teams Rooms in use. So it makes sense that Cisco is connecting more of its hybrid-meeting enhancements and IT-friendly device management tools to Teams users. 

From the start of the brands’ partnership, Cisco’s Teams-certified products provided all the NVIDIA-boosted intelligence in Cisco’s camera, audio and video technologies. But now, after a year of learning what customers needed in full-scale integrations, Cisco has opened up a few more features.

On the IT admin side, customers can dual-register Cisco Devices for Teams Admin and also Cisco Webex Control Hub, which adds usage, occupancy and environmental sensor insights. It also enhances UI and opens up the API to actively use Cisco sensor data to improve Teams meetings.

From a user experience standpoint, there are few extra improvements. A new Cisco RoomOS version from last fall has added Signage capability to Microsoft Teams Rooms. That’s the most outward-facing update. But inside the rooms, Cisco RoomOS also adds AI-enabled analysis to improve the human factors of a hybrid meeting. Using sensor data, Cisco hardware adjusts to how people are using spaces, measuring room size and occupancy to calibrate microphones and cameras so everyone is heard and seen.

Cisco started its collaboration with NVIDIA on AI-enabled meeting room technology almost ten years ago, so RoomOS is pretty smart. Its Cinematic Meetings experience setup allows Cisco devices to follow presenters around the room, intelligently listen for audio cues and switch between multiple cameras. Then the sound and video is processed for framing, zoning and multiple streams to create a better meeting. 

There are still more updates coming, and PPI is tracking all the layers where Cisco has opened up its APIs for more customized integrations. It’s a long list of new options, and it all adds up to collaboration rooms that are easier to use and smarter to manage and maintain. 

Ream more about the new collaboration between Cisco and Microsoft here.

Get in touch with PPI to find out how these new Cisco offerings can improve the Teams Rooms experience in your collaboration spaces.