Videoconferencing in rural areas can be used save on separate physical infrastructure for various services and boost financial inclusion, said a Cisco executive.

“If you have a shared infrastructure, you can use one videoconferencing system like Cisco's Telepresence and provide education, banking, medical and other services,” said Mr David Hsieh, Vice-President, Marketing — Emerging Technologies, Cisco. For example, one could use videoconferencing between 8 am and noon to provide schooling, between noon and 2 pm for banking, and between 4 pm and 6 pm to provide medical services in rural areas.

“You don't necessarily need a very big TV. You could use a 37-inch TV to get good clarity,” pointed out Mr Hsieh. To do this, Mr Hsieh said the Government had to provide broadband across the nation and use video to scale expertise. “When will it happen? I don't know. Pilots and experiments are happening, and I think that in the next five to 10 years, it will become a reality.”

While rural areas could benefit by using one videoconferencing facility, Mr Hsieh said penetration in cities would be much greater. “In the next decade, Telepresence at home will be common, even in India,” he said, and pointed out that with bandwidth increasing, people were keen on finding ways of using it.

Cisco's aim was to make video as easy to access as text, said Mr Hsieh. “We want to provide the best of both worlds and give users the convenience of text and the capabilities of video.”

Voice from video

Cisco is working on technologies to extract voice from a video and convert it to text, and allow users to search through a transcript, he said.

“We can take a video, automatically identify who is speaking, and provide a colour-coded timeline so that if you are given a video of many people speaking one after the other, you can skip to a particular speaker.”

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