Cisco Webex launches real-time translation

https://business-review.eu/tech/cisco-webex-breaks-through-language-barriers-and-launches-real-time-translation-217869

by achow • 5 years ago

110 87 5 years ago

akie• 5 years ago

The linked article is low on details. Here's a (sales) video showing how it would work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePYMMXVJPYg in a regular meeting.

the-dude2• 5 years ago

What do you mean?

FTA:

- inclusive

- level playing field

- AI technologies

- seamless

- smart hybrid

- intelligent experience

How many details do you need?

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

Is there blockchain involved or not?

numlock862• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Based 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

ZephyrBlu• 5 years ago

Eh, I thought of text rather than audio when I read the title.

spoonjim• 5 years ago

It’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• 5 years ago

I also thought it was real time audio translation, as google meet has speech to text already for a while.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Have they invented their own technologies, or are they using service speech-to-text and translate functions like e.g. Amazon offers?

iso16313• 5 years ago

Maybe they could launch a linux app, like the one Slack, Zoom and even Microsoft Teams have.

But instead they pretend it's 2003.

cecja• 5 years ago

hey you can use it in a browser now which is better than what we had in the last 5 years.

johannes1234321• 5 years ago

Really? 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_• 5 years ago

But you can’t share your desktop.

iso16313• 5 years ago

So many broken features - whiteboards and rejoining breakout sessions for two.

dfsg42• 5 years ago

Last fall I couldn't use it until I changed my useragent to indicate I was on Windows.

Steltek3• 5 years ago

The 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.

x1ph0z• 5 years ago

The browser version makes me want to tear my eyes out. It takes forever to load, and when I do get into a meeting, sometimes (like 70% of the time), the audio doesn't load.

pcl2• 5 years ago

FYI I just commented about our upcoming Linux client in another thread in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425669

Yizahi• 5 years ago

Press star six to pay respects :)

Thank god our corp moved to Zoom just before epidemic.

godelmachine• 5 years ago

I don’t follow your point. Was it a pun?

type_Ben_struct• 5 years ago

Mixture of the Call of Duty “Press F to pay respects” and the *6 to mute and unmute I believe.

DJBunnies• 5 years ago

Clearly you’ve never dialed in :)

tkgally• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years ago

I'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• 5 years ago

Agreed, 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...

llarsson• 5 years ago

Turn on automated close captioning on youtube, and see how often it gets the speech wrong, even for English. Now imagine feeding that into a translation service.

The output just barely manages to get the broadest meaning across. If even that.

If it is also supposed to be real time and able to handle a conversation at a realistic pace... just forget it.

This is just too be able to list it as a feature, it's not actually going to be good or work.

jhugo• 5 years ago

We've been testing realtime translation of realtime captions in real meetings lately, with a view to basically answering the same questions you're raising.

Using Google's translation API, the number of mistakes is reasonably low, and it's absolutely possible to have a comfortable meeting even when technical topics are discussed, as long as participants are aware of the possibility of mistranslation and take care to avoid resulting miscommunication. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough with those caveats. We have plans to test out several others including DeepL.

Roark66• 5 years ago

Well, I'm not sure if my experience can be classed as "in work related context" as I didn't use the software at work, but people I communicated with were. Specifically, I know only few words in German, but I often buy stuff from companies in Germany. Most of those companies have an English speaking customer service, but this one huge Web shop didn't. They had an item in stock, I bought it... and then nothing. 1k EUR later days passed and there is no status updates nothing. I heard Skype has a translation service so I decided to try it by myself first. Unfortunately Skype's service is quite inconvenient to use with the other party not expecting it. Basically Skype implements the translation as a third (virtual) person on the call. That translator then simply repeats what it can hear in target language, but both parties can hear each other's original voice. This way to use an auto translator is very confusing for an unsuspecting person on the other end. So in the end I did something different. I set my android mobile with the phonecall on loudspeaker, used another android phone to open Google translate in listening mode so I got a text translation of everything that was said. Also I started a Windows pc (with a speaker) and went to Google translate Web version. There everything I typed in English would be instantly translated to German and I could hit the speaker icon for the synthesised voice to read it in German. By controlling two mobile phones and a pc I actually got a pretty good user experience (for both sides of the calls I think). However I can type pretty fast so there wasn't much of a delay in responding. If I was implementing a voice translation service I would like to have an option to mute(or lower the volume a lot) of original speakers and hear only the translation. Unfortunately such voice conversations will always have higher delay than the text alternative(for fast typists).

yorwba• 5 years ago

It's also worth considering the alternative of people who speak different languages working together without translation.

I found this article about the interaction of Chinese and Mongolian workers at a fluorspar mine particularly illuminating in that regard: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/01/25/the-double-tongued...

Excerpt:

Xu Jun, the crushing section lead, recalled: "Once I asked my Mongolian assistant to make a slanted connector for the ore crusher. I showed him many times the angle of slant with my gestures, but he just did not get it. Do you know what he gave me in return? A straight angle and a blank look. In the end I had to make one myself to show him what I meant. He instantly understood and raised his thumb, saying ‘Sain, sain’ [‘good, good’]. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry."

He blamed the incident on the Mongolian worker’s ‘inflexible brain’ rather than acknowledging a communication failure for which both were responsible. Such refusals to share responsibility were not uncommon among monolingual workers. Linguistic miscommunication without timely mediation easily perpetuates essentialist stereotypes. After the incident, Xu Jun would always ask a bilingual person to bridge the linguistic gap. Even though the translation may be imperfect as the intermediary might not know particular technical terms in Mongolian, their colloquial translation of the key actions involved could help the listeners understand.

iso16313• 5 years ago

He blamed the incident on the Mongolian worker’s ‘inflexible brain’ rather than acknowledging a communication failure for which both were responsible

Lol, it's like he works for the 1700s East India Company

baxtr• 5 years ago

Still won’t make me wanna use that outdated piece of software.

ThE_-_BliZZarD• 5 years ago

I 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

Which for me really drives home how "up2date", modern and user-friendly this abomination of a software is.

catmanjan• 5 years ago

I sigh with relief when I see retro installers like that - at least you know it will work!

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

We 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• 5 years ago

Used 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.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

What is wrong with that picture?

sim0n• 5 years ago

Nothing is "wrong" with it, the design is just something from the 90s/early 2000s.

blntechie• 5 years ago

They at least appear to hav a proper uninstaller. Many new services nowadays just hide that as a separate exe somewhere deep in their support pages.

cheschire• 5 years ago

Cisco 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• 5 years ago

tot be fair. WebEx seemed to work just as fine as most of the alternatives.

zapt022• 5 years ago

We 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• 5 years ago

When 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.

ludamad2• 5 years ago

I think the Cisco attitude (my experience) is more focus on value-driving features rather than "maintenance". Unfortunately, robust user experience ends up being more expensive than starting over sometimes with that attitude

xnyan2• 5 years ago

COVID was the first time that someone in our c-suite really had to use the our video chat platform at the time, Webex.

Within two weeks we got Zoom plus MS Teams as a backup. I notice that Webex is really being developed now, and I’m sure the devs are perfectly fine people but Cisco is absolutely mercenary with their resources and the second they think reallocating dev resources will make them more money, they will again leave Webex to rot and die.

Spooky23• 5 years ago

Webex gets more abuse than deserved imo. If you like Zoom you should be ok with Webex.

I’ve worked with it for years, and while Cisco is glacial with improvements, it’s probably the most secure enterprise platform and is better than the Microsoft and Google alternatives. Zoom has better UX, but the security story isn’t as good and their future depends on how they can pivot into more lucrative business.

It’s a fast moving target though, and if they don’t get their shit together, Microsoft and Zoom will close the security gap.

pschw• 5 years ago

If you like Zoom you should be ok with Webex.

Webex lacks a native Linux client, and the browser-based version has limited features and in my experience has had some recurring issues with audio and screensharing. So, purely from a user experience point of view, the shift from Zoom to Webex hasn't been painless.

cgh• 5 years ago

Yeah, I am on Webex much of the day and it's generally great, even over a slow vpn with many attendees and video feeds. But I use the native client on MacOS. I wonder if a lot of the complaints are coming because of the browser-based version. For sure, the security story is the best around.

tw044• 5 years ago

I'm not following where you're going with this. Over the last decade Webex has been far and away the most reliable voice/video product I've used outside of a small window at the very beginning of COVID.

They also haven't been caught repeatedly lying about their security practices and silently sending meetings through China.

Do you have some examples of Cisco "doing the bare minimum"? Or things they can't do that competitors do?

Literally my only complaint over the years with the service is around the storage of recorded meetings and that may just be an issue with how my company manages it.

pcurve• 5 years ago

Webex was a big step up from adobe connect.

I wonder if Webex issues people are experiencing had to do with VPN capacity issues while working from home

sitzkrieg• 5 years ago

just got off a webex meeting, the audio delay is still over a second for phone participants, this causes a lot of problems. fun issue to have in 2021

haswell• 5 years ago

My employer switched to Zoom long before COVID. We formerly used Webex. From a quality-of-life perspective, the contrast is stark. Things I used to struggle with in Webex:

- Multiple versions of the Webex client

- UI so slow I couldn't start/stop sharing quickly in many meetings

- Extremely high CPU/RAM consumption (Zoom suffers from this, too, but generally doesn't completely lock up my computer)

- Email client plugins that only occasionally work

I'm a remote product manager (even before COVID), and spend most of my days on virtual meetings. The reduction of daily/hourly friction by moving to Zoom cannot be overstated (in my case, anyway).

I'm unhappy with Zoom for philosophical reasons, but would choose Zoom over Webex 10 times out of 10 from a UX/quality of life perspective.

breakingcups• 5 years ago

Does Webex allow you to wait in a virtual waiting room until the meeting starts by now?

I've been forced to use Webex for our governmental client a few times and the experience is awful compared to all alternatives on the market I've used (Zoom, Teams, Skype for Business, Hangouts, LetsMeet, etc.)

In the example above, say your meeting starts at 11:00. You want to be professional and prepared (and rule out issues with the client) so you try to open the meeting at 10:55. With all other products, that's perfectly fine, you'll see a spinner until the meeting actually starts.

With Webex I had to wait until the organizer logged in. If I tried to open the meeting before that it would show a message indicating the meeting hadn't started yet and completely close out the client.

The virtual background feature is woeful too and exactly as GP described. Barely enough to satisfy a check mark on a comparison chart, nothing more.

Audio and video quality was subpar compared to the other alternatives too. It was a grating experience and I 100% ehco what the person you were responding to has said.

Steltek3• 5 years ago

- The ONE MONTH OUTAGE that WebEx suffered a while back was embarrassing beyond belief and I can't believe my company kept the service after that.

- The "mute" button status does reflect whether you are actually muted!!! I've had the entire meeting hear me even when "muted". This would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous. It occurs if you have a simple network hiccup, btw.

- The innumerable variations of "WebEx" encountered that all behave and suck differently. I recently discovered "WebEx Events" where I had to hand over contact info (twice!) in a browser to join an entirely internal meeting. Then I had to quit right away and add Audio access in macOS and join all over again, since it wasn't the same "WebEx" and didn't have permission.

- For text chat, I primarily use WebEx through a browser as there is no native Linux client. It's atrociously bad. For example, clicking a link does not open a new tab. No one wants this behavior. It would be less bad if WebEx didn't take 5 forevers and 10+MB to load. I've hacked around with TamperMonkey for now.

olyjohn• 5 years ago

It's a well-circulated story that the guy who started Zoom (Eric Yuan) left Webex because he got tired of visiting customers and being embarrassed by the product performing like crap.

There's a good reason that Zoom has taken over a huge chunk of Cisco's market share. It's not because Webex is a good product.

"I was 37 and Corporate Vice President of Cisco-WebEx. It was a year before I left the company when in the feedback we came to know that WebEx did not have a single happy customer. So I felt embarrassed. The WebEx Cisco collaboration wasn’t a good service to customers."

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/news...

centimeter• 5 years ago

WebEx is by far the worst and least reliably video service I’ve used (compared to Cisco jabber, jitsi, google meet, etc.)

tenacious_tuna• 5 years ago

Disclaimer: current/new Cisco employee, though I don't work anywhere near Webex.

Webex is... amusing, from an internal perspective. Partially because of the namespace collisions: Webex Teams, Webex Meetings, or Webex Trainings? I've run into all three, and all three are different.

As far as I can tell, Teams is supposed to be our Slack-adjacent/competitor. It works... fine. My previous corp had switched from Flowdock to Microsoft Teams, and M-Teams was truly, truly awful as a chat client. At least W-Teams behaves how I would expect a chat client to. (Though I dearly miss the full emoji reaction selection.) The media viewing behavior, or the group creation behavior (I can't just make an ad-hoc group chat between people, I have to create a 'space'--Why?!)

Webex Meetings seeeeeemmmsss to be just the realtime video component? The Zoom-adjacent/competitor? Teams integrates this on its own, so it's hard to tell sometimes. Broadly I think the Webex UI for calls looks/feels/behaves better than the Zoom equiv, and I have felt that the AV/screenshare quality is notably better than Zoom or Hangouts. But on Zoom I'd always bumble through the menus, or feel like I had a zillion buttons in front of me and didn't know what they did, or be annoyed with how to even create a meeting. (This last one is really counfounded for me, 'cuz the calls are integrated into Teams, so I never have to leave the chat client to make a call, which is likely not the case for other Webex users.)

Webex Training is... Hillariously frustrating. It feels like it hasn't been updated since inception (which looks like it was 2004). There are so many terrible, terrible UX decisions that the Cisco meeting facillitators call out every time they run up against. ("We're going to play a video, so everyone make sure you've muted yourself so the audio doesn't leak and that your laptop speakers are on so you can hear the video," or "We're going to forcibly unmute all of you so you can have control over your own mute/unmute <unintelligble hash of insane noise from all participants>", the mute/unmute/reaction buttons being impossible to find and CHANGING POSITION DEPENDING ON ROOM AUGH)

Anyway. Point is, I've felt similarly to the above, but only within specific Webex domains. I've really been meaning to find a Webex engineer to sit down and ask why this stuff hasn't been fixed, but I suspect I already know and the answer is the same as at my previous corp: Maintenance was de-prioritized, and now minor issues have become egregious, but it would require massive engineering effort to even begin solving them.... and those resources would be better spent on $Successor to get it fully up to spec to replace the aging/ailing incumbent. Meanwhile, the "modern" versions of Webex (Teams, Meetings?) seem to work well enough within the corporate boundaries that we don't feel the pressure. Doubly so because Cisco employees don't get the opportunity to see what life is like "on the other side of the fence" with Zoom/Slack/Flowdock/whatever--which, yay, dogfooding, but boo, lack of contrast.

myshoesareblue• 5 years ago

Well Webex Meetings is discontinued now dunno where you’ve been.

Regarding dogfooding: I’d say an equally large problem is that many Cisco employees (ESPECIALLY in Collaboration units) are issued hardware endpoints for office or home use. So we spend unnaturally few minutes in-call using actual, normal-people Webex desktop clients and instead join meetings using DX80s, Desk Pros and other desk units.

xnyan2• 5 years ago

One of the upsides to COVID is that it has forced more exceutvtiv

dan-robertson• 5 years ago

I wonder if they’ll ever launch real-time videoconferencing

ludamad2• 5 years ago

Good chuckle from someone at Cisco using WebEx every day

curiousgal• 5 years ago

I literally just finished a round of interviews and the interviewers had to call me on my phone because Webex wouldn't transmit audio.

numlock862• 5 years ago

Cisco Webex implementing a new feature feels like they are trying to grab a last straw just before the final sinking happens ...

spark3k• 5 years ago

I'm looking forward live audio translation in the speaker's voice.

OakNinja2• 5 years ago

WebEx 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• 5 years ago

Looks 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...

tyingq• 5 years ago

Webex 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.

happynacho2• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years ago

We bought webex teams... yeah enough said

laurensr2• 5 years ago

Have a look at quaqua: they have loads of experience in the offline interpreting world and are now taking this online: https://quaquameeting.com/

jimnotgym• 5 years ago

Back 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• 5 years ago

For 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• 5 years ago

I 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.

happynacho2• 5 years ago

I 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.

laurensr2• 5 years ago

This is not just about realtime meetings. It is about interpretation/translation.

Cisco Webex launches real-time translation

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