Jabra has established itself in both the business and consumer worlds through not only its innovative approach to product design and development, but also extensive research into what users want and need. This was at the core of the Make Virtual Meetings Feel Human Again AV conference, which attracted an audience of professionals from systems integrators and commercial companies, universities and other organisations that now rely on conferencing systems in today’s office environments.,
“People are already working in hybrid situations for meetings and collaboration,” commented Aurangzeb Khan, Jabra’s senior vice president of intelligent vision systems and creator of the Jabra PanaCast range of webcams and video bars. “What we need to do is enable a sense of shared identity for them, even though they don’t always work together in the same space.”
This intention was underlined in the study produced by the London School of Economics (LSE), which Khan said had taken a “groundbreaking approach” to its research. The methodology involved creating four meeting scenarios, each with a different technical installation: two conference rooms, one featuring the Jabra PanaCast 50 intelligent video bar, the other with a competitor’s video bar; and two remote set-ups, the first based around a Jabra PanaCast 20 personal video conferencing camera and Jabra Evolve2 85 wireless headset, the second using a laptop with built-in audio.
COLLABORATIVE CLARITY
Among the study’s findings were that participants found the two Jabra-based environments produced a 16 percent increase in trust, a 27 percent rise in the clarity of the collaborative experience and a 47 percent increase in the quality of input compared to the competing technologies used in the other scenarios. “The North Star in our work is to create a curated experience that allows people to engage better,” said Khan. “Great technology can allow you to hear and be heard better, see and be seen better, with natural and pleasing experiences that enable participants to focus on their work by eliminating or minimising the sources of meeting fatigue.”
Jabra believes that artificial intelligence (AI) and data were key to creating conferencing systems for the future, working with audio and video to produce the best possible quality for meetings. The importance of AI was highlighted by Microsoft teams rooms specialist Robert Karlsson in the presentation Modern Meeting Experiences Infused with AI. Karlsson outlined the continuing evolution of Microsoft Teams, which will now feature Microsoft’s new AI-based personal assistant, Copilot. Jabra’s PanaCast 50 is one of the first Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows video bars to offer these new capabilities.
The final session of the day was a panel discussion, for which Khan and Karlsson were joined by Tom Arbuthnot, a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and co-founder of Empowering Cloud, and host of the event, Jabra’s managing director for EMEA North, Nigel Dunn. Arbuthnot observed that AI would only get better, bringing more automation and flexible working. Khan sees AI as something that will make people more productive: “It will give us more time back.”
Closing the event, Nigel Dunn said there was still debate over what offices will look like and how big they will be in the future. “We can take the insights from studies like the LSE’s back to our customers and show them that technology does have a positive effect on how people work, its impact on the quality of participation in meetings and the overall experience,” he concluded.
To read about Jabra’s study with the LSE, visit www.jabra.com/lse.
Visit www.jabra.co.uk to find out more about Jabra’s PanaCast video solutions and professional headsets.
