After announcing in November last year that they would be releasing a new AI Spark Voice Assistant to all users of Cisco Spark, Cisco have now unveiled its capabilities in front of an audience and announced that it will be unleashed for use by Spark licensees soon.

If you’ve ever had an iPhone, you’ve no doubt experimented with Siri. If you’ve ever had an android phone I’m sure you’ve been heard saying “Okay Google” on multiple occasions. It’s fun to play around with smartphone voice assistant tools to see what kind of humorous answer you can trick them into saying, but when it comes to actually utilising them in order to improve everyday efficiency, most people forget they exist.

This is where Cisco Spark voice assistant is different from other AI assistants.

Cisco designed this voice assistant in order to meet professional needs and perform business-oriented tasks. This is unique because all existing voice assistants, such as Cortana, Alexa and Siri, were designed for the consumer domain; a work-based toolset is a brand new concept to the voice assistant market.

Here’s a video of the Spark voice assistant’s first demonstration at Cisco Live Melbourne 2018:

Machine Learning

The functionality of this bot will also continue to improve as time goes on. This is because of machine learning. Machine learning is the concept of the more an AI is used, the more data it can process. The AI will learn from this data to improve its responses when it is subsequently used again. This is an extremely powerful tool and we will be hearing more and more about it in the news in the years to come. This appears to be an advancement for Cisco in the AI market, likely sprouting from their acquisition of MindMeld last year.

Release Date

What Cisco kept quiet was an exact date of when the Spark voice assistant would become available, although it will likely be soon. When it is released, the great part is that you won’t have to pay anything more to use it. Cisco will roll out the Spark voice assistant update to everyone who already possesses a licence for Cisco Spark, another example of the continuous improvements Cisco make to their products.

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