While Work from home tends to remain for the time being amidst the pandemic, most of the organizations are forced to send their employees home. In such a situation, communications and collaboration tools are expecting audio and video enhancements to boost their teamwork experience. Remote work tools have changed from being useful to becoming a necessity in a couple of days as workers have been sent home with their notebooks and desktops for an uncertain number of days. Job is no longer constrained to office. It occurs in the living room, the home office, the coffee shop, or wherever the staff occurs to be.
There’s always something going on in the surrounding that creates excessive unwanted noise. The need to minimize background noise is more urgent than ever before. External noise reduces the efficiency of teamwork and can potentially undermine the employees’ productivity.
Cisco’s WebEx Platform:
WebEx is a Cisco video conferencing system that enables users to connect in any venue and safely on a wide range of devices. The program helps users to hold online meetings by using HD video, audio, and screen sharing. Ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 businesses use the Cisco Partnership, which ensures that hundreds of millions of customers through some of the largest organizations in the world can use BabbleLabs speech enhancement technology.
About BabbleLabs:
BabbleLabs has been developing and integrating speech technologies since the company was formed in 2017. The company is based in Campbell, California, and presently has 33 staff members. BabbleLabs speech processing uses AI to differentiate background noise from a human speech in real-time and to automatically eliminate unnecessary noise. BabbleLabs has a safety emphasis on its technologies. The technology eliminates noise at the source 100 percent of the time on the consumer side. This protection protocol would supplement Cisco’s security through design techniques.
Reason for Acquisition:
Last week, Cisco reported that it plans to buy BabbleLabs to boost the WebEx video meeting experience. The deal will be finalized in Q1 of 2020, awaiting closing terms and authorization. When the deal is completed, the founders of the BabbleLabs team will join the Cisco Partnership Community. SVP and General Manager Javed Khan are the founders of the company that essentially falls under Cisco Security and Applications Business headed by Jeetu Patel.
Acquiring BabbleLabs would result in significant audio upgrades to Cisco’s WebEx software quite rapidly. Cisco’s long-term goal is to completely incorporate BabbleLab ‘s speech amplification technologies into its whole collaboration portfolio, including remote connectivity, conferencing and texting, and workspaces, although this is expected to take a little time. With the acquisition of BabbleLabs, Cisco aims to create a better, more reliable collaboration tool that enables users to improve efficiency. This purchase is a clear effort aimed at dramatically enhancing Cisco’s video conferencing quality.
Cisco’s plan to acquire BabbleLabs is prompt, particularly since video and audio communication platforms are the basis of keeping staff linked when operating from home. With vast numbers of corporate workers moving to remote areas and operating from home settings, the need for accurate and stable audio without background noise is at an all-time high.
