We have a very large Global Customer that requires and uses Voice and Video in Air-Gap, On-premises only and no outside internet connectivity, with multiple Cisco Voice and Video Endpoints, CUCM, Expressway, Codians, Cisco Meeting Server (CMS), Cisco Webex Meeting Server aka CWMS, and Skype for Business; this customer has a sizable population that requires Accessibility Accommodations aka ADA Accommodations. Since the start of 2020, we have been in modernization efforts, and are upgrading/replacing both the endpoints and the infrastructure. Approximately 75% to 90% of all communications is on-premises only based systems, for the cloud based communications, they use a mix of MS Teams and Webex, but it is 25% or less than the total, as the on-premises based calls are on a private air-gapped network, that are not accessible from outside the organization.
With Covid-19 and the increase in video conferencing, we are starting to be asked about accessibility options available. There has been a big demand for Closed Captioning or some sort of captioning, that is not tied to the cloud. Currently, the only native options for captioning of any kind on Premises are CWMS, which is End of Life or trying to integrate some third party solution, but that has not been productive thus far. The end users are aware of Zoom and MS Teams, and even Webex Cloud having captioning options and they continue to ask about bringing it to our On-Premises Air-Gapped Meetings. Requesting Cisco Voicea or some sort of Captioning Options be brought to the on-premises Air-Gap CMS deployments, that cannot reach out to the cloud.
We could bring closed captions to SIP, streaming, recording it just needs to be prioritised against other work. If you need this then keep reminding us. No plans at the moment to have a Cisco AI powered voice to text transcription engine on premise, there were some 3rd partioes that were looking into it
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Thank you for the update and for bringing this to CMS.
Are you going to present the captions outside of WebApp, are users on video endpoints, Skype for Business, Jabber, streaming, recording, etc., be able to view the captions, or is it confined to WebApp only?
We need the captions to be presented in all viewing methods.
Is there any plans to bring in AI generated captions like what is available in Webex cloud right now? This is needed and highly requested by a couple of large customers in the Air-Gapped environments
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We are planning to add closed captioning for web app users to the 3.4 release. This will nbe siumilar to CWMS whereby a human needs to type the captions.
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