The Cisco Pinnacle Awards - Market Impact Winner: Audio Noise Removal for the WebEx Portfolio

The Pinnacle Awards are Cisco’s top recognition, honoring contributions furthering Cisco’s legacy of technical innovation. Market Impact Award winners, Audio Noise Removal for the Cisco WebEx Portfolio, share their innovation.

CHRIS ROWEN: We work in the real world, but sometimes, we have to be professional. And that's why audio AI noise removal is an important development. We have been able to develop an algorithm that can separate out noises and voices and proliferate it in order to bring that experience to everyone.

SAMER HIJAZI: And what's unique that, in addition to its technology ability to remove noise in the classic sense, is the introduction of the capability of speaker separation-- specifically, the ability to separate foreground from background talkers and preserving the foreground speaker and removing the background talkers without the need for enrollment.

SAVITA KINI: So the biggest challenge for our team was to support the huge install base of Cisco across devices and apps.

DROR MAYDAN: And there were two challenges with that. One is we have to support an incredibly large number of devices with 40 different packages. The other is we had to deal with systems with low CPU usage or heavy load and had to develop a system that could automatically detect the current load and then throttle back as necessary.

SAVITA KINI: So the benefit of all this work was we removed noise from over 100 billion meeting minutes and benefited millions of users.

CHRIS ROWEN: By ensuring that it works across every language and every accent and every environment, we can be more inclusive of more voices.
Customers love it because they don't have to think about are they ready for this meeting? Are they in complete control in their environment? Are they being heard? That love translates into more customers, more renewals, more new customers that come to the Webex platform.

SAVITA KINI: What makes our team different is they are very diverse. We have people of four different languages. And we have a lot of women researchers and engineers on the team.

DROR MAYDAN: We have remote development teams in six different continents.

SAVITA KINI: We are all like a family, and our family has been part of our product journey.

DROR MAYDAN: Where else would noisy kids be part of the solution?