Machine Vision Will Soon Bring a Watchful Eye to Meetings
Posted by CMSWire on December 19, 2017:
One day in the not-so-far-off future you will walk into a conference room with your game face on — and it will stay on. Conference room technology is coming that will be able to record and evaluate people's expressions for signs of boredom, anger or anxiety over what is being said. No more hiding a yawn or secretly checking your phone for messages — and no more trying to be discreet about your opinions.
If all this sounds like yet another way artificial technology is entering the workplace, that's because it is. To be sure, the above scenario is not an imminent one, but the seeds are being planted right now.
'Let's Start the Meeting'
Picture this: You walk into a meeting room where a few people are already in attendance and say to no one in particular, "let's start the meeting." The AI-based system providing the tech support responds to the voice command, and the meeting begins.
Sounds simple enough, correct? And why not, Alexa and Google can do similar functions at home. Indeed this functionality is already creeping its way into the conference room via Alexa for Business and its various partnerships.
But behind the scenes the AI system in our example is working a bit harder than it may appear. It knows, for instance, who is chairing the meeting, who organized it, who the attendees are and even whether they are happy to be their. How? That conference room technology is also equipped with video cameras and facial recognition. "When you think of AI in the sense of Alexa or Google, it's all around the voice," Joe Berger, a collaboration practice director at World Wide Technology told CMSWire. "But what's missing is the eyes behind it. How does the system know there are, say, five people in the meeting room and who they are?" The answer: facial recognition tied to a video system.