Cisco Umi brings HD telepresence into the living room
Tech Industry
-This is Jessica Dolcourt from CNET.
I'm here in San Francisco where Cisco is unveiling its Cisco Umi Telepresence Service for the Home.
-Umi Telepresence is about you and me connecting in new ways right in your living room.
First of all, you will see that, of course, you use it with your existing HDTV
as well as your existing broadband, and the solution effectively has four simple components.
And it's really simple to deploy.
You have the Umi Telepresence camera that sits on the display, a settop box that you can put anywhere, connected wired or wirelessly to the network, a very simple-to-use remote, no pointing required.
But very importantly, there is the Umi Cloud Service that enables a range of features and capabilities across the internet.
-The product has hardware components that Martin talked about.
There's a very powerful camera with a mic array that takes advantage of room size noise.
All you have to do is plug that camera into our console and the console is then connected into your television.
The console has wired or wireless
and so it connects to your home network and you use a very small remote to control the experience.
The setup has been designed for consumers to do in their home on their own so we've tried to create a lot of simplicity here.
So we designed the Umi Clover which is the primary way you navigate on your television.
It shows up when you need it, it disappears when you don't need it so it's, again, a very simple paradigm that controls the entire experience.
With the Umi Clover, you can scroll your contact list, you can record videos, play your messages, and when you're actually going to make a call, you get your contact list up on screen and you just select the picture of the people you wanna call and you're on your way to making that call.
The other thing that I'm really excited about is we know that not everybody is gonna have Cisco Umi although we'd be delighted if everybody did.
We're happy to be working with Google and when you're using your PC or Mac,
you'll be able to use Google Video Chat to call Umi and vice versa.
It's a great, great interoperability for people who are traveling and are away from home, or perhaps you have a child in college that isn't gonna have Umi in their dorm room.
The product is priced at $599 for the hardware solution, and there's a $24.99 monthly service fee.
The service fee covers all the features that you've seen including unlimited calling, video recording and video messaging,
personalization features, privacy, and, of course, we'll be delivering more features in the future that you'll be able to take advantage of as well.
And, so, I'm absolutely excited for you to see the demo.
I think that's where you can really get a taste of the chocolate and experience it.
-I'm going to call Auntie Jane.
Let me see here.
Alright.
It will begin to do a ring back and Jane happens to be the aunt of Bryce, my son.
-Hello.
-Hey, Jane.
How are you doing?
-Doing well, how are you?
-Very good.
I don't know if you see all these wonderful people here but there are lots of people in the room taking a look at Cisco Umi Telepresence.
