Cisco Open-sources the MindMeld Conversational AI Platform

Well the Big 5G Event in Denver has come to a close for this year. Cisco was the Diamond sponsor at the Big 5G Event in Denver this week. This event is a merger of Over the past five years, conversational applications have entered the mainstream. Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Alexa field tens of billions of voice and natural language queries every month. Voice-enabled devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home reside in over a hundred million homes and represent one of the fastest-growing product categories of all time.

Given this widespread consumer adoption, many global corporations are investing heavily in Conversational AI to realize a similar game-changing transformation in the modern enterprise. The challenge however, is that nearly all software developers and data scientists still struggle to build truly reliable and useful conversational experiences for enterprise use cases. While there is an abundance of academic research and open-source software covering the topic, there are few practical resources to help guide engineers toward building production-quality conversational applications suitable for enterprise deployment.

Cisco, as the global leader in enterprise voice technology, has been at the forefront of many of the advances in Conversational AI over the past decade. In 2017, Cisco acquired MindMeld, which pioneered and commercialized one of the industry’s first Conversational AI platforms. Over the past five years, the MindMeld Conversational AI Platform has been used to build advanced conversational applications for some of the world’s largest organizations. Through this experience, the MindMeld team has formalized many of the techniques and best practices for building great conversational experiences in enterprise environments.

Easily build and test conversational AI applications

Today, Cisco is taking a big step towards empowering developers with more comprehensive and practical tools for building conversational applications by open-sourcing the MindMeld Conversational AI Platform. In addition to this Python-based machine learning framework, Cisco is also releasing extensive documentation and a step-by-step guide, called the Conversational AI Playbook. Intended for applied machine learning engineers, the Conversational AI Playbook represents one of the first practical guides detailing the steps required to build modern, state-of-the-art conversational experiences. By making this open source software and companion documentation available to partners and developers, Cisco is committed to helping more enterprises find success building and deploying a wide range of conversational applications.

As the destination for all things developer at Cisco, Cisco DevNet will provide resources so developers can more easily build and test conversational AI applications. In open-sourcing MindMeld and providing rich developer resources, we can build a robust developer community that will change the way we interact and get work done in our workplaces.

Cisco CDA Advances Spain’s Secure Digital Transformation

The company’s 26th Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program, 12th in EMEAR

Cisco today announced its commitment to help advance Spain’s secure digital transformation under the company’s Country Digital Acceleration(CDA) program. The CDA program combines partnership and shared investment between Cisco, communities, governments, and businesses to utilizedigital as the foundation for their future. 

Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO, Cisco: “Through Country Digital Acceleration, Cisco has the opportunity to positively impact communities, governments, and businesses around the world. We are excited to support the long-term economic goals of Spain and benefit their citizens in the digital economy.”

Called ‘Digitaliza’ in Spanish, CDA will align with the country’s goals for digitization. It will drive projects that advance citizens’ quality of life, create jobs and workforce education, and enhance global economic competitiveness. It foresees a collaboration with the public sector, the industry -including ICT, energy, finance, industrial companies, service providers, small medium businesses (SMBs), startups from any vertical, and partners- plus academia and will address the following areas: 

• Industry 4.0: Encourage the digitization of industrial companies, service providers, and utilities. Help close the digital gap for small medium businesses through innovation, with the ultimate goal to increase efficiency and competitiveness.
• Smart Territories: Advance smart, inclusive, sustainable and attractive digital territories. Furthermore, help enable digital education and connected schools, and develop efficient smart mobility and transportation for people and goods.
• Critical Infrastructures: Foster the deployment of intelligent and highly secure national networks and protect critical infrastructures with advanced cybersecurity.
• Digital Jobs and Innovation: Develop digital skills (ICT/STEM) to help employability, with a focus on areas such as Industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT) and cybersecurity, leveragingnearly 20-years of the Cisco Networking Academy program in Spain.

Ongoing initiatives

CDA builds on Cisco’s 25-year commitment to helping Spain realize its full digital potential in collaboration with public and private sector organizations. By bringing the CDA Program to Spain, Cisco continues to create positive impact for society and the economy. Some examples of initiatives already being implemented are:

• Barcelona Co-Innovation Center. Inaugurated on January 28, 2019, the latest addition to Cisco’s global network of Co-Innovation Centers serves as a hub for open, creative collaboration. It focuses on urban innovation, healthcare and financial services evolution, helping to develop a vibrantco-innovation ecosystem.
• Cisco Networking Academy program, designed to reduce the growing ICT professional’s gap and promote employability. This non-profit initiative has already trained close to 175,000 Spanish students since 2000 in state-of-the-art digital technologies, through more than 390 educational centers and 780 teachers. The ‘Digitaliza’ goal is to increase the total number of new students to 100,000 in the next three years.
• Collaboration with regional and vertical innovation centers, such as Sevilla Futura and Zaragoza's Innovation in Retail Center (T-ZIR), providing Cisco mentoring and equipment to help local startups innovate.
• Cisco DevNet Spain. Innovative companies can also connect with Cisco DevNet in Spain and globally, a community with more than 500,000 developers building applications over Cisco’s open digital platform.

About CDA

Cisco developed the concept of Country Digital Acceleration to stimulate global digitization. Cisco is collaborating with governments in selected countries to strengthen digital research and education, stimulate digital entrepreneurship, accelerate innovation, develop new economic clusters and improve national infrastructure. Each CDA programme has been developed to meet the needs of the respective country. So far, more than 300 projects have been launched on smarter transport, smart cities, eHealth, cybersecurity and connected education.

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