10 ms·
Cisco Webex launches real-time translation
- akie 6y agoThe linked article is low on details. Here's a (sales) video showing how it would work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePYMMXVJPYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePYMMXVJPYg in a regular meeting.
- the-dude 6y agoWhat do you mean? FTA: - inclusive - level playing field - AI technologies - seamless - smart hybrid - intelligent experience How many details do you need?
- numlock86 6y ago> Webex debuts real-time translations in meetings – from English to 100+ languages. Choose from Armenian to Zulu and everything in between. > Product page lists like two dozen languages at best What number base are they using? I was always under the impression that the consent without any special notation (like 0x as hex or base16-preifx for example) would be base10 and things like "100+" would mean "more than one hundred". Guess I was wrong?
- ram_rar 6y agoBased on the video [1] it seems like a real time text translation. Its doesn't do real time audio translation, which is what the title of article implies. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePYMMXVJPYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePYMMXVJPYg
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoEh, I thought of text rather than audio when I read the title.
- spoonjim 6y agoIt’s transcribing your audio and translating it into a subtitle. That seems what would be expected, unless you thought it would synthesize a voice in Mandarin on the other end? That would probably not even be desirable, just as subtitled movies are better than dubbed movies.
- Twaway45609 6y agoI also thought it was real time audio translation, as google meet has speech to text already for a while.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoHave they invented their own technologies, or are they using service speech-to-text and translate functions like e.g. Amazon offers?
- iso1631 6y agoMaybe they could launch a linux app, like the one Slack, Zoom and even Microsoft Teams have. But instead they pretend it's 2003.
- cecja 6y agohey you can use it in a browser now which is better than what we had in the last 5 years.
- johannes1234321 6y agoReally? I know that they had a Java version, which sometimes worked with luck on some machines. Last time I wanted to join a WebEx conference, a few weeks ago, I didn't find a web version and ended up installing the Android App, which gave me such a bad experience ... which made me leave the meeting early even though content was interesting.
- dade_ 6y agoBut you can’t share your desktop.
- ay 6y agoWorked for me when I last tried couple of months ago, Ubuntu 20.04 with Firefox. But maybe I was being a test subject (since I am an employee).
- iso1631 6y agoSo many broken features - whiteboards and rejoining breakout sessions for two.
- dfsg42 6y agoLast fall I couldn't use it until I changed my useragent to indicate I was on Windows.
- Steltek 6y agoThe browser version is a joke. It makes my 22 core, 128GB desktop look like a 2000's netbook. Even simple text chat is ungodly slow. This is not over a VPN either.
- Yizahi 6y agoPress star six to pay respects :) Thank god our corp moved to Zoom just before epidemic.
- godelmachine 6y agoI don’t follow your point. Was it a pun?
- type_Ben_struct 6y agoMixture of the Call of Duty “Press F to pay respects” and the *6 to mute and unmute I believe.
- DJBunnies 6y agoClearly you’ve never dialed in :)
- tkgally 6y agoI would be very interested in reading about people’s experiences using machine translation—either text translation or spoken interpretation—in work-related contexts. When the participants in a back-and-forth e-mail exchange, for example, do not share a common language and one or both use translation software to communicate, are they able accomplish what they need to do reasonably well? Or does the communication break down at some point? Can live meetings be conducted successfully when one or more active participant uses MT interpretation? Or are there too many cases of faulty voice recognition and mistranslation for the meeting to proceed comfortably? I ask because I have been thinking and writing for several years about the implications of improved machine translation for foreign-language education. I know how accurate, and inaccurate, MT can be at the sentence-by-sentence level, especially between Japanese and English, and researchers I know are starting to study how some language learners use MT. But it’s been hard to get a handle on the extent to which the software is actually used in real-life contexts.
- iagovar 6y agoI've only used text translation for articles and such, and the only translator that it's up there, from all I've tried (quite a lot), seems to be DeepL. I speak spanish, english, french and some Portuguese, and deepL is consistently better than others. That's not saying it's perfect. It still makes mistakes and uses weird wording sometimes, but it needs way less correction.
- simias 6y agoAgreed, deepl is pretty impressive, although its language selection is a lot smaller than, say, Google Translate. The usual caveats of automated translation apply though. "Take it" will be translated as "tomem-no" in Portuguese, "возьми его" in Russian and "prenez-le" in French, every time assuming that the "it" is masculine (or possibly neutral, in the Russian case). Depending on context that could be confusing if the "it" is feminine in the target language's grammar. There's also a bit of a mess with the conjugations. The Portuguese version uses "tomem", which is imperative plural (y'all take it), the french version uses "prenez" that's either imperative plural or formal/polite imperative singular, while the Russian version uses friendly/familiar imperative singular (thou, as English used to use) instead of the more polite and/or plural возьмите. Of course those are all valid translations for "take it" in English, but in a given context only one of them will be intended by the speaker. And those are all indo-european languages which share a common (if sometimes distant) heritage when it comes to grammar and social customs. If I spoke Japanese (which uses a complex system of honorifics) I'm sure I could come up with much more awkward translations. In Deepl's defense however it manages to piece it together if I give it more context, for instance "The box is on my desk. Please take it." is translated as "Коробка на моем столе. Пожалуйста, возьмите ее." where it uses the correct её for the (feminine) box, and the adding "please" made it switch to the polite form of брать. But of course in casual conversation through some online messaging application piecing together the context will be a lot harder in many cases. You have to deal with slang, incomplete sentence fragments, typos etc...
- baxtr 6y agoStill won’t make me wanna use that outdated piece of software.
- ThE_-_BliZZarD 6y agoI laughed seeing that headline, as I uninstalled WebEx from my work machine not 15 minutes ago and came across this gem: https://imgur.com/8l572YF https://imgur.com/8l572YF Which for me really drives home how "up2date", modern and user-friendly this abomination of a software is.
- catmanjan 6y agoI sigh with relief when I see retro installers like that - at least you know it will work!
- bpodgursky 6y agoWe have very different memories of the early 2000s. I distinctly remember hunting down and deleting all the DLLs and registry crap these uninstallers left behind.
- gnud 6y agoUsed to use WebEx at work. I hated it. But I can't remember anything wrong with the installer/uninstaller, really. Don't know why you want to complain about that. The uninstaller has a UI that is readily understandable, and does what it's supposed to. The rest of the application does not.
- cblconfederate 6y agoWhat is wrong with that picture?
- sim0n 6y agoNothing is "wrong" with it, the design is just something from the 90s/early 2000s.
- cblconfederate 6y agoas opposed to bloated 2020 minimalist designs that don't work
- cheschire 6y agoCisco voice / video products feel like they're designed to look good on a product comparison chart rather than to provide a robust user experience. It's so hard to explain to senior decision makers about why the cisco product should be replaced because on the surface it looks like cisco does everything that the competitors do. And large companies can't easily compare KPIs for a product they already have against the unknown third order effects of a competitor's product. Cisco knows that so they keep doing the bare minimum.
- kazen44 6y agotot be fair. WebEx seemed to work just as fine as most of the alternatives.
- zapt02 6y agoWe use WebEx as our VC of choice where I work. Turns out the only reason people used it was that there was no alternative when using the VC in the office. When we switched to WFH people dropped WebEx immediately in favor of Google Meet. Now I hear that GMeet will be available in our physical office when we return. One lost customer for Cisco. It's hard to explain the problem with WebEx other than GMeet (Or Zoom, or really any other platform) just works and feels better.
- goatinaboat 6y agoWhen we switched to WFH people dropped WebEx immediately in favor of Google Meet Out of curiosity did they "just do it" or was this an official decision? The "new normal" has really turned a lot of stuff on its head and brought "shadow IT" into the mainstream like never before. It's one thing to replace a video calling app but I wonder if we will ever see employees self-organise to boot out incumbents like SAP as well, that like Webex and Teams are sold on the golf course.
- zapt02 6y agoIt was informal. No doubt it relly helped that we are G-Suite users and adding Google Meet to a calendar event is a one-click operation (although it is possible to add other providers now). Compared to the ultra clunky WebEx client, buggy web version and no native integration with GCal at the time, it just faded out of existence for us.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI wonder if they’ll ever launch real-time videoconferencing
- ludamad 6y agoGood chuckle from someone at Cisco using WebEx every day
- curiousgal 6y agoI literally just finished a round of interviews and the interviewers had to call me on my phone because Webex wouldn't transmit audio.
- numlock86 6y agoCisco Webex implementing a new feature feels like they are trying to grab a last straw just before the final sinking happens ...
- spark3k 6y agoI'm looking forward live audio translation in the speaker's voice.
- OakNinja 6y agoWebEx is great for screen sharing (low frame rate, low compression), and while a bit quirky, the MacOS client is native and a lot better than all the Electron abominations we see from the competition. Also, sound quality in a natural conversation, eg. People talking at the same time, is at least adequate.
- achow 6y agoLooks like this is the result of their 2019 acquisition. Cisco to bring voice transcription to Webex with Voicea buy. The Voicea acquisition is part of a “cognitive collaboration” initiative as Cisco revamps its collaboration software and eyes new AI capabilities. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3430717/cisco-to-bring-voice-transcription-to-webex-with-voicea-buy.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3430717/cisco-to-bring...
- tyingq 6y agoWebex is going to have a hard time with so many of its customers already paying for Office365 and getting MS Teams bundled in. Or, if Teams isn't good enough, the same customers are using Zoom. It's hard to justify the need for Webex if you already have Teams and/or Zoom.
- happynacho 6y agoI would go as far as saying that Teams is really now better than Zoom. They put a huge development push in the past year.
- rdtwo 6y agoWe bought webex teams... yeah enough said
- laurensr 6y agoHave a look at quaqua: they have loads of experience in the offline interpreting world and are now taking this online: https://quaquameeting.com/ https://quaquameeting.com/
- jimnotgym 6y agoBack in my day we didn't have Teams and Zoom, we had this clunky old thing called Webex. I heard they still use it at some big enterprises, along with Fortran and Cobol.
- hpcjoe 6y agoFor me personally, webex simply isn't a contender based on the lack of a working linux client. Zoom ... just works. Others, even that horrible Teams, works, on linux. Webex doesn't. Then there's the UI. And the complexity of connecting to meetings, especially if you are on the road, and trying to do this on a phone, with one hand. Where they ask you for the 3000 digit meeting code. And sometimes a password. I know, on paper, it might be better than the alternatives. But, in practice, it is nearly unusable. Just my opinion.
- Consultant32452 6y agoI have a tip for one-handed joining on a smartphone. On my work iPhone I just open the calendar event and there's a little red telephone icon titled "Webex Meet". I click on that and the WebEx app just pops up and joins.
- happynacho 6y agoI dont even know why they exist anymore. The ones that will stand on top after everything are MS Teams and G-Meet (from their productivity suite) and Zoom as a standalone service.
- laurensr 6y agoThis is not just about realtime meetings. It is about interpretation/translation.
- cecja 6y agoWhy has no one brought up the abysmal search function. If you search for anything further back than 2 weeks good luck or better start scrolling because it's the only way to find it now. It really is a cruel joke especially for the not so tech savy people in our org.