[HN Gopher] Cisco Webex launches real-time translation
___________________________________________________________________
Cisco Webex launches real-time translation
Author : achow
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-03-11 09:22 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (business-review.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (business-review.eu)
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| cgh wrote:
| 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.
| pschw wrote:
| > 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.
| pcl wrote:
| FYI we're actively working on native Linux support. It will
| be rolled out in phases, but we're targeting parity with
| the Mac and Windows platforms. The first release is planned
| for this April.
|
| The client is in early field trials right now. I don't
| think we have public links to the client as yet. Also,
| we're still fighting the "which distros" battle. We'll
| start with Ubuntu and CentOS / RedHat, with more to follow.
|
| Here's our announcement about it from a few months back:
| https://blog.webex.com/team-collaboration/webex-community-
| me...
| [deleted]
| OakNinja wrote:
| Cool, thanks for sharing!
| [deleted]
| kazen44 wrote:
| tot be fair. WebEx seemed to work just as fine as most of the
| alternatives.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zapt02 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| breakingcups wrote:
| 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Does Webex allow you to wait in a virtual waiting room
| until the meeting starts by now?
|
| I believe it's a tweakable setting. Ours does that by
| default, it says "waiting for X to start the meeting" if
| you join early, and the client just waits. IIRC, you can
| also set it to allow someone else to start the meeting.
|
| >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.
|
| I would agree, it didn't seem to be a priority for them
| until covid hit. Then it was solid on mobile, and non-
| existent on desktop. I believe desktop is finally on-par
| with the last few releases but I rarely use it.
|
| >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.
|
| This one I don't quite get. Video for me has been far, far
| better with webex than the others. I've got a 4K camera as
| do a few of my coworkers and webex is the only one that
| actually appears to stream in something approaching 4K.
| Teams and zoom down sample like crazy.
|
| The audio I had issues late last year but haven't ever had
| a problem otherwise. Zoom has been an absolute dumpster
| fire the last month with every vendor I work with - people
| just randomly dropping for no reason but zoom doesn't
| actually drop their connection on their end. People
| dropping and zoom just repeating whatever their last word
| was over and over and over on loop, etc. Teams is... teams.
| If everyone is coming in over the internet audio it sounds
| amazing, anything that transits internet >> phone is hit
| and miss with mediocre being the high water mark.
| Steltek wrote:
| - 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| >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.
|
| Citation? I've been using webex throughout 2020 and 2021
| nearly every day. I recall an outage of ~24 HOURS, we
| definitely didn't miss an entire month.
|
| >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.
|
| I'm not one to "blame the user" but, what? On mobile it's a
| picture of a microphone that is a white background with
| black text fills up with green as it hears sounds when
| you're unmuted, and white with red text and a line going
| through it when you're muted.
|
| On desktop it's basically the same, except the icon also
| literally says "mute".
|
| >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.
|
| There's literally 3 options. There's a webex for
| conferences that's slightly different because it allows
| hundreds of participants. There's the standard webex meet
| that people use daily, and there's the competitor to slack
| that you'd never need or likely ever use.
|
| >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.
|
| I've never had webex on linux not load a link in a new tab.
| Given you're grossly inaccurate summary of the rest of the
| app I'm questioning whether you've ever actually used it.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| 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
| pcurve wrote:
| 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
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| newman314 wrote:
| The one thing that I find superior in WebEx over Zoom is
| how the calendar events are presented. In Zoom, it often is
| unclear and I have to hunt for the event that I want to
| join, whereas in WebEx, it was always right where I needed
| it to be.
| centimeter wrote:
| WebEx is by far the worst and least reliably video service
| I've used (compared to Cisco jabber, jitsi, google meet,
| etc.)
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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...
| ludamad wrote:
| 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
| laurensr wrote:
| Have a look at quaqua: they have loads of experience in the
| offline interpreting world and are now taking this online:
| https://quaquameeting.com/
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I wonder if they'll ever launch real-time videoconferencing
| curiousgal wrote:
| I literally just finished a round of interviews and the
| interviewers had to call me on my phone because Webex wouldn't
| transmit audio.
| ludamad wrote:
| Good chuckle from someone at Cisco using WebEx every day
| tkgally wrote:
| 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.
| Roark66 wrote:
| 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).
| llarsson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| iagovar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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,
| "voz'mi ego" 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 voz'mite.
|
| 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 "Korobka na moem stole.
| Pozhaluista, voz'mite ee." where it uses the correct eio for
| the (feminine) box, and the adding "please" made it switch to
| the polite form of brat'.
|
| 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...
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Unfortunately just text no audio and no real time.
| yorwba wrote:
| 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._
| iso1631 wrote:
| > 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
| achow wrote:
| 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...
| baxtr wrote:
| Still won't make me wanna use that outdated piece of software.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| happynacho wrote:
| 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.
| akie wrote:
| 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-dude wrote:
| What do you mean?
|
| FTA:
|
| - inclusive
|
| - level playing field
|
| - AI technologies
|
| - seamless
|
| - smart hybrid
|
| - intelligent experience
|
| How many details do you need?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Is there blockchain involved or not?
| 1f60c wrote:
| And what about NFTs? To keep as a memento after the meeting
| ends. :P
| the-dude wrote:
| Let me take another look.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > 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?
| happynacho wrote:
| 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.
| ram_rar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Eh, I thought of text rather than audio when I read the title.
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I also thought it was real time audio translation, as google
| meet has speech to text already for a while.
| numlock86 wrote:
| Cisco Webex implementing a new feature feels like they are trying
| to grab a last straw just before the final sinking happens ...
| OakNinja wrote:
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Have they invented their own technologies, or are they using
| service speech-to-text and translate functions like e.g. Amazon
| offers?
| iso1631 wrote:
| Maybe they could launch a linux app, like the one Slack, Zoom and
| even _Microsoft Teams_ have.
|
| But instead they pretend it's 2003.
| pcl wrote:
| FYI I just commented about our upcoming Linux client in another
| thread in this discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425669
| cecja wrote:
| hey you can use it in a browser now which is better than what
| we had in the last 5 years.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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.
| iso1631 wrote:
| So many broken features - whiteboards and rejoining breakout
| sessions for two.
| dfsg42 wrote:
| Last fall I couldn't use it until I changed my useragent to
| indicate I was on Windows.
| Steltek wrote:
| 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.
| dade_ wrote:
| But you can't share your desktop.
| ay wrote:
| Worked for me when I last tried couple of months ago,
| Ubuntu 20.04 with Firefox. But maybe I was being a test
| subject (since I am an employee).
| x1ph0z wrote:
| 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.
| spark3k wrote:
| I'm looking forward live audio translation in the speaker's
| voice.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Press star six to pay respects :)
|
| Thank god our corp moved to Zoom just before epidemic.
| godelmachine wrote:
| I don't follow your point. Was it a pun?
| type_Ben_struct wrote:
| Mixture of the Call of Duty "Press F to pay respects" and the
| *6 to mute and unmute I believe.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Clearly you've never dialed in :)
| ThE_-_BliZZarD wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| What is wrong with that picture?
| sim0n wrote:
| Nothing is "wrong" with it, the design is just something from
| the 90s/early 2000s.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| as opposed to bloated 2020 minimalist designs that don't
| work
| blntechie wrote:
| 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.
| gnud wrote:
| 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.
| catmanjan wrote:
| I sigh with relief when I see retro installers like that - at
| least you know it will work!
| bpodgursky wrote:
| 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.
| rdtwo wrote:
| We bought webex teams... yeah enough said
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-11 23:02 UTC)