>> Announcer: Live from San Diego California, it's The Cube. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Day three of our coverage of Cisco Live. We're pleased to welcome to TheCube, Keith Griffin, Principal Engineer Collaboration from Cisco. Keith, good morning Welcome. >> Morning. Thanks for having me. >> So, lots of announcements this morning, or this week with respect to collaboration, cognitive collaboration. Webex intelligence a lot of Webex users out there. Walk us through Webex intelligence. >> Keith Griffin: Sure well Webex Intelligence and Cognitive Collaboration, it brings together a set of underlying AI and machine learning, that technologies, we loosely break them down into four areas. Relationship intelligence, which is were people insights would sit. Computer vision, where we would see our face recognition and name labels for meetings. Multi-modal bots and assistance where we would have our Webex assistant offer, and audio and speech technologies where we've got some interesting features like noise detection in meetings when you've got those like annoying dogs barking in the background when your having your meeting, and also something that we were just about to release meeting transcription, so that you can no longer have to take meeting notes and our intelligence platform will take the notes for you. >> Stu Miniman: - All right, so Keith Lisa and I did enterprise connect earlier and it's amazing some of the things that are happening. You talk about you know cloud and AI coming into meetings. Part of me is a little worried. I worked in telcom back in the 90's and it feels like in may ways in the last 20 years, we haven't got beyond the, Okay in the first 10 minutes of the meeting, let's make sure everybody's in are the right people talking, are the right people muted, I mean the machines are going to make this really easy for us so that we can stop the human people messing it up right? >> Exactly, exactly and one of the things that's interesting about that, well actually one thing I'll say is that I also can from telecom's in the 90's, I've seen that journey all the way through, and I'm still six to eight minutes late for meetings when I start them and I'd love to blame the technology and lots of people do but let's face it, hands up we're factors in this as well. We have the most amazing non cognitive features like one button to push. A single green button I just have to push that to start the meeting, but guess what I have to don't do? I don't push the button 'cause I'm setting up my laptop, or I'm taking my coat off or I'm generally getting settled in. So the technology assistance at this stage is really good. And what we wanted to do was look at, how can we take the friction out of joining a meeting even when we've got such a simple experience, and we found out things like Webex Assistance where I can just speak to the system definitely does that. It speeds the access to the meeting, but one of the things we tried out with Webex Assistance which were just about the release was call proactive mode. Now proactive mode was where I don't even have to say okay Webex join the meeting. It says to me, "Hey Keith looks like your ready to start your meeting, will I get it started for you." I simply say "yes", and while I'm setting up my laptop and taking off my coat, where were right in on getting the meeting going, and that was something we came across during our early field trials and we saw a huge adoption for customers so we go right on developing that it's going to be available soon. >> One of the things that Stu mentioned we were at Enterprise Connect a couple of months ago, Amy Chain, one of my favorite key notes, she's so animated. I know she was on stage yesterday. She announced people insights a couple of months ago. Let's kind of dig into that as the relationship intelligence. What does that mean, what does that enable, and how is that an enabler of reducing friction? >> Yeah, it's really, it's really on multiple levels I think, there's the before the meeting experience and then during the meeting. So one of the things that we found through a survey that we just recently completed was that, I don't was to misquote it but there was healthy percentage of people I'm going to guess at about 40-45% that spend a significant amount of time before a meeting googling and figuring out who they are meeting with. To try and find out more to have that connection when they get to the meeting. So what if we could just dynamically do that, and there was no need to go search or spend time ahead of the meeting, so that's one area of friction reduced or removed, so you can go right in there and you've got that personalized briefing for the meeting itself. >> So what do I see, is this.., I'm logging into Webex, or is it before the meeting and it, what kind of information about the person I'm talking to does it populate for me? >> Yeah so in the meeting itself, on your roster, you can click on a new icon that's beside the participant, and you can find out public profile information about the user, that's on the meeting, as well as their corporate directory information, if you're in that organization, and also news about their company, so I would have the latest Cisco news and just a general description of what our company does, and if I'm meeting with somebody else, they see that about me, they see my education background, and anything else I choose to offer, and choice is important, the fact that me as an end user, I'm in control of that, I'm in control of that data, I can edit it, I can hide it, I can delete it, I think that's really critical, in this era of data privacy and machine learning eccentric solutions, so that's how it happens in the meeting itself, and we're looking more also at personalized briefings and looking at how we can bring that forward, and also looking at areas like, how we could bring that into the video experience, you don't want to clutter the video experience with all this information, but it would be nice to have something more than even a name label which is useful to have, maybe a title or role or something like that, so we're looking at bringing that across the entire portfolio. >> All right, so Keith, you brought up data privacy, I want you to talk a little bit about some of the other products outside of just, you know, the base Webex, when you talk about things like facial recognition, where is that today, we know is hot button topic, you know, what are seeing and what are the request you're getting from customers. >> Yeah, we're pretty close to be able to release face recognition for name labels and meetings, and the goal of the feature, as the name suggest, is just simply to put a name label on the user, so you have that more personal connection, in the meeting. We're taking our time with the feature, because we want to get the data privacy right from the beginning, it's not something I feel you can add afterwards, you have to have a strong data privacy posture, right from the beginning, so the types of steps that we've taken, are to make sure that this is a disabled feature, so an IT admin must op the organization in, and then individual users must also enroll, and that enrollment step does two things, one, it gives a picture so that we can calculate the mathematical representation of the user for that matching, but also it offers the user the opportunity to consent to their face being used in the system, and that's really critical again back to that point about users being in control of their data, and at any point, they can go back to that, and decide I want to add a new photo, maybe I want to something like a photo with no glasses or with glasses, or with a beard or without a beard to make the system more accurate, but they can go in their and have complete control over that, hide their labels, whatever it is they would want to do. >> Keith, just a follow-up on that, maybe give us, you know, what difference is Webex from some of the other solutions out there when it comes to security and data privacy, there's a lot of new players out there, you know, how does Cisco look at themselves, versus the rest of the floor. >> Yeah, there's a lot of differentiators, probably longer than we would have time for today, but if I take face recognition for example, a lot of those user controls are really critical and important, the way that we can leverage the devices as well as the cloud, I think is a really critical aspect of that, if I think about something like, or noise detection which we haven't talked about from a data privacy point of view, we do that in the device or on the Webex client, not streaming to the cloud, and the idea is to reduce that creep factor at every aspect that we possibly can, right, so addressing data privacy mitigation at every single point, there's no single solution, I think, for it, so when you combine the user controls, where you implement the feature, how you implement the feature, and you roll of that up, it becomes a fairly significant differentiator, I did a session here yesterday, where it was exclusively on data privacy, and I couldn't even present my slides, it turned into an interview, I just stood and answered questions for the hour because people are so interested in this, but the feedback that I got was our posture on data privacy is something that makes the solutions deployable for enterprise customers, and it was great to get that feedback, we've worked hard at it, and we've continued to do that, I think it's something that we actually need to lead with as much as the features themselves. >> So as we look at the Webex platform, and all of the expansions that Cisco has done, one of the biggest complaints with collaboration that we all have as workers is this overload of collaboration apps, and switching back and forth between, Webex and Slack and email and text and all these things, talk to us about what you guys have done to mitigate that, and make Webex a more broad portfolio that would be a greater facilitator of less friction in collaboration. >> Well, that's a really interesting area to talk about, because there's two ways that maybe I would look at that, one is that, from a platform point of view, I think it's no longer good enough to just have phenomenal video and phenomenal audio, and phenomenal share, we have to make sure that we got this intelligent and contextual experience that's woven across that, and then that would bring me to the second part, which is invisible AI, it's making sure that these experiences are, you know, the users don't have to do anything to access them, that they just show up, like meeting transcription, so if I go back and look at a meeting recording afterwards, and all of the notes are neatly organized on a panel on the right hand side, that's AI at work, invisibly for me, and when I go back to review that, I've got everything I need, but I didn't have to go do something to make that happen, so we're trying a lot to focus on these invisible, cognitive experiences throughout the platform. >> Keith, how about the ecosystem, I mean Cisco talks a lot about its partners here, I went through the show floor, collaboration's a big space there, talk a little bit about the expansive ecosystem that Webex has built. >> Yeah and one area in particular that has come up in the last month is that we were able to opensource our MindMeld platform, so we acquired the company MindMeld two years ago, and built Webex assistant using their phenomenal conversationally iPad form, and then took steps in Lorrissa Horton's group to opensource that and make it available to developers and I saw some examples of that yesterday on the show floor, really amazing what people have done, where they've taken Webex assistant and combined it with bots and assistant technology that they've built, on top of the MindMeld data science platform, so I was amazed because it wasn't so long ago when we did that and they have solutions already, so yeah, really interesting first step, but there's a lot more we can do there, I'd like to see us taking Webex assistant and offering extensibility beyond just the MindMeld opensource, I would like to see us look at a multi assistance strategy which we've got, where we could potentially integrate with some of the consumer systems that are out there, consumer assistance in particular, there's a lot that we've done but I think there's a lot more that can be done in bots and the systems phase. >> When we look all of this innovation, the way this innovation that we're riding with, you know, we're in the Devnet zone, Susie Weed talks about the ways of compute, mobile edge, AI everywhere, but also this demand for connectivity, the expansion of 5G that we're expecting, the adoption of wifi 6, how are some of those ways influencing how cognitive collaborations at Cisco is being developed. >> I have never thought about that, but what I would say is that it comes down to one thing, or maybe three things: data, data, data, right, that's, all of those systems produce lots of data, AI machine learning lives on data, it's data and algorithm ultimately, that's what it is, there's tons of algorithms out there, but those areas that you mentioned, those waves, they all produce lots of data and as long as we can act on those, with data privacy in mind, and provide compelling features to customers, I think that it opens up just way more opportunities, and what we've done up to this point cognitive, is really first step type stuff, as amazing as it is, a lot of it is based heavily on supervised machine learning, I think getting to unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and acting on those larger data sets is going to bring some really interesting solutions in the future. >> All right, so Keith, look forward a little bit for us, where you know all this machine learning and AI has caused a real growth in some of the breath of the portfolio, what's exciting you kind of in the next six to twelve months, what spaces should we be keeping an eye on in your world. >> One if the areas I've been working most closely on is meeting transcription, and again, it's a tip of the iceberg type solution were we've got the meeting notes and that's great, but I really want to imagine where we could bring that next, so notes are great, but if I didn't have time to go the meeting and I didn't have time to listen to the recording, probably not going to have time for thirty pages of notes, but what if I could get insights and actions, what if I could have Webex assistant help me with that, where I say, okay Webex, what actions did I get on the 10pm meeting yesterday that I missed, that to me is an area that I think it doesn't just personally excite me from a technology point of view, but I think has far reaching impacts for users, and its in approximately that time frame, this is not five years away or ten years away, we're getting there really quickly, so that is the one area that I would really pick out right now, because it gives us the baseline to integrate with a lot of the other cognitive offers we have and really go somewhere with that. >> I would love that, you're right, I mean who has time to listen to a recording let alone read a transcript >> Keith: Right. >> So that's something to look forward to in the future, as well as next time you'll have to come back and give us an example of a customer that has, whether it's a bank or any type of other organization with a lot of work force, you know, distributed work force and some of the big benefits, all the way up to the business, the top line that they're getting so we'll have to look for that for next time. >> Keith: Sure, I'd love to do that. >> Keith, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCube this morning, we appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, for Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube live from Cisco live, day three, thanks for watching.