Cisco unveils AI-powered voice assistant to schedule and manage meetings

Cisco is launching an enterprise-ready voice assistant designed to streamline meetings, the company announced Thursday at its Partner Summit. Billed by the company as the first AI-powered assistant meant for businesses, the Cisco Spark Assistant helps users call others in their organization, as well as start, end, or join meetings without typing or dialing according to a Cisco press release. Using MindMeld's machine learning technology, the assistant takes the voice assistant--commonly used for personal daily activities--brings it to the conference room. Leaving the call-in process up to AI may reduce the chance of human error and delay while expediting the process. SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) "During the next few years, AI meeting bots will be joining our work teams. When they do, people will be able to ditch the drudgery of meeting setup and other logistics to become more creative than ever," Rowan Trollope, general manager of Cisco's Applications Group, said in the press release.