Artificial Intelligence Has Entered Your Conference Room

March 31st, 2018 by ali No comments »

From background noise suppression to facial recognition, machine learning has been working behind the scenes in your conference room from a while

Artificial intelligence belongs to the set of topics about which people speak scarily, as it evokes dark dystopias of total automation in a Matrix-style world, where humans have been submitted by robots. However, the reality is much less worrying than science fictions tell: In the form of machine learning, mister AI (the acronym for Artificial intelligence) is already at work in our daily life.

One of its many applications is precisely in video conferencing. Background noise reduction, echo cancellation, vocal and facial recognition are the four areas where this technology is more promising of great results and abler to increase users’ ease in next future.

Is AI going to do more for the video conferencing industry than the above-mentioned applications? The answer is definitively yes. The applications of this technology are – potentially – very huge, at an extent that is difficult to forecast today.

For example, by using AI it becomes possible to avoid the tedious job to watch the registration of a meeting or conversation to capture the noteworthy moments of a speech or recognize the faces of the speakers. In sales, AI could help salesmen to instantly profile customers and retrieve all the relevant information that are necessary to make the deal. The instant analysis of non-verbal feedbacks through facial expressions during a conversation could be another task where AI could excel.

Other two possible areas of application of AI are team and conference call management. Smart machines could optimize the whole call by performing some predictive analytics, in order to monitor networks and endpoints and detect potential anomalies and take corrective actions before users get affected in the conference room in any way.

Tasks could be assigned to the members of a team automatically, and AI could prove to be more effective than a human secretary in many contexts. The transcriptions of the meetings of your organization could be also delegated to robots, and task planning as well.

In conclusion, AI could bring about another disruptive revolution in offices, especially when applied together with video conferencing. The benefits for businesses would be particularly in terms of an increase in the productivity of their employees, as they would benefit from a smarter conference room with much enhanced features.

Are you interested to the future of video conferencing? You are going to find more resources and interesting articles on R-HUB`s Blog at http://www.rhubcom.com

How to Profit from Video Conferencing Adoption

March 26th, 2018 by ali No comments »

The benefits of video conferencing are strictly depending on the way this technology is implemented in your organization. Let’s see some of the common tricks and pitfalls

Your organization has decided to adopt video conferencing. However, the benefits in terms of increased productivity and lower costs that this technology is expected to bring will not come immediately, but only when your team actually use video calls in everyday activities. This process is not automatic; like any change, you have to promote it and actively drive your collaborators to adopt video conferencing.

Consider that, like any new technology, video conferencing would raise a pack of suspects and much diffidence at first. Therefore, it is important to work out a strategy to lead the change. The three pillars of a good strategy are:

  • Training and education. The best way to beat ignorance and persuade reluctant people to accept a change is to explain it in a clear and understandable way. My suggestion is to hold some training courses on video conferencing for your employees, so that they can learn the benefits of this technology and how to profit from it.
  • Kindly force your team to try video conferencing. Hold some company meetings through video conferences and send a clear message that video calls will be the future of your company. Adapt or disappear is still a motto that is understood by the largest majority of people.
  • Awarding the usage of video conferencing. Awards are better than punishments, and the carrot is more effective than the stick in the long run. Incentives do not need to be monetary; status increases and praises work even better.

Tracking is the second important point of any implementation of a new technology. This is a quite difficult step, as it is important to decide what to monitor. Video conferences can occur through a wide plethora of devices (browsers, servers, software, and hardware), while each division of your organization works differently from each other and uses video conferencing in its own way. Therefore, collecting and cleaning data could become difficult.

Last, you have to set your goals. What does success exactly mean for you? How to measure it? Once collected, the data must be interpreted. It is important to set some few key indicators that work as yardstick to confront the real increases in productivity with what your expectations are.

If you are interested in video conferencing, its benefits and challenges please visit R-HUB`s Blog (http://www.rhubcom.com), where you are going to find many interesting resources and posts.

How Enterprises use Video Conferencing: The Numbers

March 24th, 2018 by ali No comments »

According to Vyopta, consulting and technology are the two industries that make the largest use of technology, while the average time of a video call is about two minutes

Are you looking for some analytics about video conferencing and its usage in enterprises? Here come some insights that have been taken from a survey conducted by Vyopta, a company very active in the fields of design and user experience.

In which industry is video conferencing mostly utilized?

Consulting and Technology take the lead with over 7 million of minutes of use in the period 2013-2015. Benchmark and legal firms come after with 1.7 million of minutes of use, while the organizations of the fields of Education and Finance stay at the bottom of the list with only 1.3 and 1.2 million of minutes of use respectively.

What is the relation between the size of the organizations and the usage of video calls?

Direct proportionality: the largest the organization, the higher the amount of minutes spent in video conferences.

How fast has been video growing?

In the last two years, video has grown of 100% in usage, from 0.9 million minutes on average to around 2 million minutes. However, software video grew faster than hardware video (291% against 128%).

The sample of the companies that have been surveyed by Vyopta includes over 60 organizations of different dimensions and number of employees. This is not an homogeneous cluster of companies, as each firm is different. Some depends heavily on video conferencing, while others privilege other means of communication like e-mails, chats and audio calls.

The industries represented in this survey belong to consumer products, consulting, government, k2-education, video providers, higher education, finance, technology and healthcare. 50% of the organizations have over 10.000 employees, 22% among 1000-5000 employees.

The metrics adopted in the survey include the active video endpoints, active VMR, video minutes, numbers of meetings, the average number of participants per meeting, the utilization per device type.

The purpose of this survey was to give experts the instruments to make correlations among companies of similar size in order to set goals for one’s own organization.

The decision to opt for video minutes as basilar metric has taken because of its quantitative nature, its simplicity and the fact that is often available in most video conferencing analytics.

Take aways:

  • Big organizations are great consumers of video calls;
  • The usage of video conferencing has been booming in the last few years;
  • Short video conferences are more frequent than long video conferences.

Video Conferencing compared with Audio Conferencing

March 16th, 2018 by ali No comments »

Which is the best between these two popular technologies? Both video and audio conferences have their advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, there is no definitive answer; it depends on the specific situation

In the domain of conference calls, Technology advances at a rapid pace. It seems like only yesterday that audio conferencing was presented as a disruptive technology, while today it is regarded as  something quite trivial and at everybody’s reach. “Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change”, and the seeds of change has grown so fast in the world of virtual conferencing that we have moved from headphones and microphones to calls in Hi Definition in just one decade; and after Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual trip to Puerto Rico in October 2017, the jump to meet people through virtual reality is near.

However, video conferencing has not yet outplaced the traditional audio conferences. This is not surprising at all, as we live in a world where there are lots of examples of old technologies that are able to survive the new technologies, like bicycles versus cars.

Undoubtedly, in comparison with audio conferencing, video conferences have some enhanced features. However, audio conferences still work better in some specific situations. Let’s explore the pros and cons of both technologies.

  • Video conferencing enables visual communication. This is the great advantage of this technology on its rival. It’s no small thing, if you consider that over 70% of human communication is not verbal.
  • Video conferencing enables data and document sharing. This feature is especially helpful in business, as you can avoid a physical meeting saving time and money that way.
  • Video conferences are more engaging. This is a natural consequence of the fact that visual communication is enabled, and therefore guests can enjoy a plethora of visual stimulations (images, colors, the facial movements of the speaker) that are not available during an audio call.

However, in some few circumstances audio conferencing beats video conferencing.

  • First, audio conferences are cheaper. This is an important point for organizations that have to keep costs under control. Consider that in many cases a video call is redundant, as in most every-day conversations participants do not need to exchange visual information, like slides or graphics, at all.
  • Audio conferences work well even when the internet connection is bad, as they rely on the ordinary telephone lines. Therefore, audio conferences are preferable in situations like airports, trains, buses, streets, or whenever the internet is bad.
  • The technology requested for audio calls is simpler. Video conferencing is great, but it requires good equipment. Audio calls work well also on old smartphones without HD screens, because audio conferencing technology is older. Therefore, if the technological level of the devices of your interlocutors is poor, you’d better withdraw on the traditional audio conference.

In conclusion, an organization should have a conferencing system that allows user to switch on demand from video to audio calls, like, for example, R-HUB`s TurboMeeting (http://www.rhubcom.com). Easy-to install and with zero maintenance, this suite of video conferencing servers  offer your organization an inexpensive and complete solution that merges the highest level of data security and technological reliability with a great flexibility of use. It’s the dream of every business that has to face the competitive market of today.

Audio Conferencing for Dummies

March 15th, 2018 by ali No comments »

The ABC of audio conferences explained in simple words

Once, I was on the phone with my boss, when he suddenly called a customer to join our conversation: this was my first contact with audio conferencing technology. We spent some little time defining the details of a project, and then we hung up. It was something neither difficult nor worrying.

An audio conference (also named conference call or audio teleconference) is nothing else than a conversation among remote speakers through any devices that enable the long-distance transmission of sounds, like smartphones or tablets. The number of people involved can be more than two: usually, we have at least three people, but they could be more.

PCs can also be used to participate to an audio conference, on the condition that they are equipped with speakers and microphones. Conference calls can be conducted either through the ordinary telephone line, or the internet. The first solution works better when your internet connection is bad. This is the reason why few tools for audio conferencing like R-HUB`s TurboMeeting (http://www.rhubcom.com) let customers the choice between the two means.

What are the advantages of conference calls? Usually, three key benefits of this technology are mentioned:

  • Audio conferencing is more cost-effective than other means of remote communication, like video conferencing. The quality of audio-calls might be even better than the one of video-calls in many cases, and particularly when the pcs or tablets of the participants do not support High Definition.
  • Audio conferencing is easy to utilize. Setting-up is intuitive and any other device than smartphones is requested. This proves to be a great advantage in those situations as standing in the bus or the train, or while sitting and waiting for your plane in an airport.
  • Audio-conferencing is a powerful way to communicate, especially in business. The alternative should be a trip, an option that is much more expensive and time-consuming than a placing a call.

And the disadvantages? Yes, they are of course, like in every technology.

  • During an audio-call, the non-verbal communication gets fatally lost. This is inevitable, as participants cannot see each other. However, most conferencing solutions support both audio and video conferencing today. Therefore, this does not seem to be a difficult problem to solve.
  • You cannot be sure that participants are focused on the meeting. This is a consequence of the fact that you cannot see them.
  • The quality of sounds could become a problem, especially if there is some background noise, or the telephone line is bad.
  • During audio conferences, it is not possible to share documents, images, or slides. In these cases, you have necessarily to scale up to video conferencing.

In conclusion, you’d better choose a solution that let you free to switch to video calling, so as to have the highest number of options available and make the most of the two technologies.