January 20, 2020
Vendor’s Adaptive Composition automates tasks to improve the user experience
Channelnomics Staff
Pexip is launching an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled software platform designed to address key challenges in videoconferencing such as complexity and poor user experience.
The Lowdown: The Norway-based company this month unveiled Adaptive Composition, an automation technology that’s device-agnostic and can work with videoconferencing systems from any vendor to more naturally frame meetings on the screen and to ease the management of the meetings.
The Details: Videoconferencing is becoming an important business tool as enterprises look for ways to encourage collaboration among an increasingly mobile workforce in an IT environment that’s becoming more decentralized. However, the complexity of systems and a frustrating user experience – such as getting conferences working correctly over multiple types of devices and the inability of systems to integrate with other tools – can hamper adoption.
Pexip’s platform includes features enabled by AI to address a range of issues:
> Automated framing of participants: Users in videoconferences are often seen on camera off-center or small when in a large room. Adaptive Composition automatically frames participants to create a more natural and engaging environment.
> Intelligent composition: The platform goes beyond voice detection to determine which participant is featured on the screen. It prioritizes rooms that have more people, as well as the active speakers, to ensure the most active rooms stay on the screen and also reduces the unused space around video feeds.
> Improved meeting indicators: Embedded meeting indicators show the host the number of attendees, audio-only users, and the lock and recording status. Names are displayed when participants speak, improving the user interface and keeping individual speakers in focus.
The Pexip platform can be offered to any participant, whether they come into the meeting through a video room system, browser, or app.
The Impact: Pexip is 100% driven by the channel and has more than 300 partners around the world, most of whom will be able to take advantage of a software platform that can run on any vendor’s system. It will be important because despite the challenges, the global videoconferencing market is expected to reach $6.7 billion by 2025, growing 9.2% a year, according to Grand View Research. The software segment will be the fastest-growing, fueled by tech innovations that are pushing organizations to continually update their systems.
Adaptive Composition will be available as a tech preview in version 23 of the company’s self-hosted Pexip Infinity software, which will launch this quarter.
The Buzz: “We want to make virtual meetings just as effective as in-person meetings,” Pexip CTO Giles Chamberlin said. “With our AI-driven, video-first meeting approach, we’re putting every person on an equal footing, ensuring that everyone can be seen and heard. By removing complexity for end users, we can deliver an outstanding meeting experience for organizations around the world.”
“The meeting experience is often broken due to the complexity of technology and user experience challenges,” said Rob Arnold, principal analyst with Frost and Sullivan. “With Adaptive Composition, Pexip is taking an innovative, human-centered approach to enhance the user experience through automation that allows the technology to get out of the way and empowers meeting participants to focus on collaboration. While others are attempting to achieve this from a room perspective (i.e. zooming at camera level), Pexip is solving this at the platform level to provide a device-agnostic solution that works with the technology you already have.”
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