What’s so NEW about the All New Webex?

The WebexOne series highlights a wave of Webex innovation to drive experiences that are 10x better than in-person interactions, help organizations collaborate seamlessly, and transform their employees and customer experiences to power an inclusive future for all.

Newest Features to Bring More Engaging, Intelligent, and Inclusive Experiences

Earlier this year we set out to make Webex 10X better than in-person interactions a reality. We know that’s a tall order, but we are up for the challenge. We want to make sure that no matter your geographic location, where you are from, the language you speak, your personality traits, or whether you have special needs — with the all new Webex — everyone is included. This week at WebexOne, we unveiled the all new Webex – one easy-to-use and secure way to call, message, meet, and get work done.

See the all new Webex in action:

I’m really excited about what we are delivering and I’m sure you are going to love it, too. Here are just some of the newest features designed to bring more engaging, intelligent, and, most of all, inclusive experiences to you.

Creating an Engaging and Fun Experience

First of all, your work environment should reflect your personal style so the all new Webex lets you customize your workspace with new color palettes for your app background, the ability to add photos and images that reflect you and your team, or co-branding with your logo to showcase your company.

New advanced and reimagined video layouts so you can set your own stage. The all new Webex allows you to go from the standard grid view to showing as many or as few participants you want. You can drag and drop participants on a stage and stack the rest on the top or on the side. Scrolling between participants is now just like scrolling through a document. As a presenter, you can choose your fellow presenters and once you have your perfect layout you can set the stage for all participants in the meeting.

We’ve also taken content sharing to the next level with immersive share. The benefit of immersive share is that it lets you get closer to your audience without them having to take their eye off the content you are presenting. Similar to the way a TV weathercaster’s image is superimposed onto their weather map, Webex lets you immerse your image and shared content on a single screen. Share things like images, slides, or videos in the background with your live image video in the forefront. We also take it one step further by enabling you to resize your video and place it where you want.

We now also have AV1 codec in meetings which is real-time, high quality optimization for video collaboration, that reduces bandwidth, enables next-generation content and avoids many issues that have plagued those of us working from home. AV1 codec will enable richer and better experiences, even in the most difficult network conditions.

Let’s not forget fun. Today, we live in a culture of emojis and instant response. There’s no reason why that has to stop when you’re in a meeting. AI-enabled in-meeting reactions allow you to immediately express yourself non-verbally using emojis and natural gestures. Why interrupt a meeting when you can simply click an emoji – to show support? You can give a thumbs up, down, or applaud, or raise your hand to trigger reactions in the meeting. The Webex gesture features will be localized across the world to honor and respect regional cultures as well. This powerful feature allows even the most introverted personality to provide feedback and express themselves in a meeting.

Artificial Intelligence to Help You Work Smarter

If there’s anything that makes the Webex experience 10X better than being here, it’s artificial intelligence. If you were meeting with a team in person and the grass was being mowed outside your office building, there’s nothing you could do but put up with the noise or interrupt your meeting and move to another room. But in a Webex meeting, not only would that lawn mower noise be automatically removed, but your speech would also be enhanced so you could send the best audio into the meeting. There’s also, of course, Webex Assistant for Webex Meetings, which takes the mundane tasks like note-taking and meeting transcripts off your hands so you can focus on the meeting. We’ve been hearing a lot of positive feedback from you about this and we’re continuing to evolve it further with enhancements like automatically putting meeting artifacts into relevant spaces so they can easily be available to team members who need to keep work moving.

And in an era when we can be inundated with emails, text messages, and app notifications, the latest application Webex will also make you as productive as possible by helping you to prioritize how you respond to messages. It leverages the new Webex Graph technology to prioritize the most important messages for you based on the people and spaces you interact with the most. You’ll see those all-important messages from your manager or critical project teams first, based on your preferences. These messages are highlighted for you so you can quickly read, react, or reply. Even better: If there are any highlights that don’t quite match what your preferences, you can simply “send feedback” and give Webex some pointers. The system learns from your feedback and gets smarter and more personalized in the process.

The Most Productive Meetings are Inclusive

You can’t get the most out of your meetings unless everyone can engage and participate equally. That has been our biggest priority in feature development for the all new Webex, and we are very pleased to share some advanced capabilities that bring everyone together so they can do their best work.

With real-time translations, language barriers in meetings will be a thing of the past. Webex Assistant will soon offer live translation from English to the top 15 languages spoken by 80 percent of the world population including Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Dutch, and Japanese. You can select the language and spoken words in the meeting are translated in real-time. We will be working to quickly expand this list over time so everyone can participate.

We have also introduced new meeting templates designed to help you meet less, get more done, and give everyone a voice. These templates help better focus the time you spend in meetings so you can quickly resolve issues, get questions answered, or simply solicit feedback.

When all you need to do is quickly get an answer to a question, our new Quick Sync template allows you to set time limits so you can get together, get what you need, and get on to other things. Quick sync meetings help you avoid the 30- or 60-minute meetings that are often overwhelming your calendar (because that’s the time increments that calendaring apps allow). With Quick sync meetings you can book a 2-minute, 5-minute or even a 7-minute meeting. You set the time. Meet with anyone and when the automatic timer runs out, your meeting ends – no need to try and fill the time or “give time back.”

When you need to make sure everyone has a chance to speak up in meetings, the new Round Table template allows you to give everyone a voice. This meeting template gives all meeting participants a designated amount of time to speak with a timer to count down remaining time and a participant that list shows who has gone and whose is next. Everyone has a chance to speak – one at a time, so everyone can be heard.

In the massive shift to “virtual everything,” remote events have also become the lifeblood for connecting people in all aspects of their lives―from friends to family to work colleagues. At Webex we’re all about making sure even remote events are highly interactive experiences so we’ve introduced two new scalable modes to support meet your audience needs.

Webex Events already offers many of the advanced features that you appreciate in Webex Meetings today, such as live transcriptions, panelist lobby, and practice sessions. We’ll be adding progressive support for up to 25,000 participants as well as producer layouts, moderated video Q&A, and breakout sessions to make your large events 10X better.

And for those times when you simply need to broadcast a live message or want to showcase promotional videos to your larger audiences, we are introducing Webex Webcast mode, which can allow you to livestream your meeting to up to 100,000 attendees.

We’ve also recently announced Cisco’s intent to acquire Slido s.r.o, a technology company that provides a best-in-class audience engagement platform. Slido technology enables higher levels of user engagement―before, during, and after meetings and events. The technology will be part of the Cisco Webex platform and enhance our ability to offer new levels of inclusive audience engagement across both in-person and virtual experiences.

As you can see, we’ve been busy, but we’re just getting started. Our teams are all in for making the Webex experience 10X better than in-person interactions. There’s so much more to come as we strive to make Webex more engaging, intelligent, and more inclusive than ever before. Stay tuned!