The magic that started with Cisco Spark Board continues. The Cisco Spark Room Kit and Cisco Spark Room Kit Plus are the newest additions to the Cisco Spark portfolio, which aims to revolutionize the meeting room.
We’ve packed innovations into each of the Room Kit options. All you need to do is to add a video display or two. The kits use automation and intelligence to remove the frustration and delays you’ve experienced with many meeting room technologies.
Both Room Kit and Room Kit Plus are available for on-premises deployment with a set of next-generation features, such as counting the people in the room. When rolled out with Cisco Spark, the kits deliver a full host of next-level experiences enabled by the cloud. Buy now for an on-prem or hybrid environment and be assured you’ll have the additional benefits of Cisco Spark when they are ready.
Smarter Meeting Rooms
Connecting people is about more than seeing each other; it’s about getting more done – quickly. With Cisco Spark Room Kits, meetings can start on time and flow uninterrupted.
- Smart start-up with auto wake-up and automatic pairing with a personal device
- Smart presenting with wireless 4k sharing
- Smart platform with APIs for third-party developers
- Smart integration for simpler interaction and connection to third-party devices
This is the Future
I’m particularly excited about three innovations that show where artificial intelligence can take collaboration.
- Intelligent framing: We’re pushing the boundaries with a smart and effortless experience. It’s like having a TV camera operator in the room. We have had speaker tracking in our high-end systems – and now Cisco Spark Room Kits have it, too. The feature automatically detects who in the room is speaking and selects the best camera framing for that person. “Best overview intelligence” detects all people in the room and selects the best group framing when no one is speaking. If a large room has only two people, the camera intelligently frames those people.
- Analytics in diagnostic mode: Artificial intelligence can be pragmatically applied for resource planning. The Room Kits have a high-performing face-detection module that tracks where people are and the angle they’re facing. The system pinpoints the speaker through audio triangulation using the six embedded microphones. The system also counts the number of people in the room. You can send all this data to a management system for customized applications.
- Voice and face recognition: This is still in beta, but you’ll soon be able to place calls via voice commands and the system will recognize attendee faces and label them with their names. These pre-production capabilities present groundbreaking opportunities for both automated calling and content delivery based on a meeting’s participants.
Cisco Spark + Cloud = Advantages
The Cisco Spark Room Kits in our office are registered to the cloud, which means I can take my meeting with me — moving it from my mobile phone to the meeting room. When I walk into any room that has a registered Room Kit, it recognizes and greets me with a message on the screen. Registering to Cisco Spark enables a seamless workflow before, during, and after the meeting. That’s because the Room Kit is an extension of the online Cisco Spark space. People in the room can also initiate a call or share a file from a Cisco Spark space on a personal device.
The advantages also extend to IT. The Room Kits provide end-to-end encryption and are easily provisioned and managed with alerts and metrics. The kits join the large portfolio of Cisco Spark-ready endpoints, including the cloud-optimized Cisco Spark Board 70 and 55.
Raising the Bar on Quality and Choice
And by the way, the Room Kit options both have great audio and video. The built-in microphones capture voice and perform speaker tracking. We’ve optimized the speakers for voice, lip sync, and echo cancellation. And, for the most advanced camera capabilities, we feature a 5K UltraHD camera.
You can deploy Cisco Spark Room Kit in a small-to-medium-sized room, and Cisco Spark Room Kit Plus in a large room. Both options support one or two displays. I think you’ll want dual displays when you see how beautiful the white board looks when dialing into a Cisco Spark Board. Imagine the experience: You see the white-board content in stunning 4k resolution on one screen, connect with people in 4k on the other, and interact with the white board on your laptop or tablet.
The Room Kits work with your current display, or use an LG display to optimize the experience. This LG optimization is an initiative with vendors to ensure that you get the highest quality experience beyond our own technology.
We’ve unpacked quite a lot here. The most important take away is that the Cisco Spark Room Kit and Room Kit Plus deliver high-quality, next-gen meeting experiences to every room.
The new benchmark for Collaboration endpoints
The toys get better every year. What used to be science fiction is coming to the office or home office near you. #amazing.
How far we’ve come since Bladerunner quality on Video Endpoints. This should be in every Home, let alone every meeting room.
Cisco Spark is The Platform
This is out of the world thinking and innovation put to practice at its best! More to come…Cisco Spark has ignited the fire!
How does the wireless presentation sharing work? What medium is used for this?
I like the face recognition aspect often there are meeting across many campuses and you dont know all the names that go with the faces
Could you share more on the LG optimisation? What does using an LG give me that another screen would not?
I can tell you what it does NOT give you —
CEC via HDMI compatibility –
We are chasing MAJOR issues with LG’s inability to accept standard “ON-OFF” commands when you put TP unit into standby mode.
I cannot understand WHY Cisco’s BU would drop this endorsement knowing this —
Very impressive. Congrats to the team.
Keep up with the great job!
Very cool technology and I got to play with some of it. I can’t get past the incredibly high licensing costs or reliability issues. This is WAY early in the hype cycle. I am choosing to stay with vendors with the same products who have a few more years experience in this arena. Everything else we own is Cisco, but that is starting to change too as generic hardware becomes the norm in the industry whether it be servers, SDN, etc. I hope Cisco continues to innovate like this, but they MUST realize the competitive pressure is truly out there, and they are losing smaller customers fast. https://status.ciscospark.com/
yes and no –
I depends on your usage –
If this is you primary for of communicating – then I’d say you don’t want to be on the early edge. If this is just message, meet, and video conferencing – then the issues that the early adopters are experiencing probably wouldn’t impact your business.
I say this with confidence – being a part of the first customer rollout – globally –
Hi Snorre,
Thanks for sharing this post to know more about Csico spark room kit. certainly I’m configuring one in this moment