Linius aims to add magic to video conferencing with Whizzard

Cloud-based solutions provider Linius Technologies has unveiled Whizzard, a new product for the video conferencing and enterprise collaboration markets.

Integrated with conferencing and enterprise collaboration technology such as Zoom, Webex Meetings and Microsoft Teams, Whizzard is designed to address two key markets – the corporate and enterprise market with Whizzard-meet, and the university and higher education market with Whizzard-learn.

Linius said it expects the video-conferencing market to achieve a compound annual growth rate of over 19% between 2020 and 2026. It pointed out that Zoom had announced earlier this year that it had more than 300 million participants a day and Microsoft Teams had reported up to 2.7 billion meeting minutes a day. It added that more than 183,000 educational institutions are now using Microsoft Teams, as are 91 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Linius said Whizzard will enable employers, employees, students and teachers to transform hours of video footage into bite-sized relevant pieces of content, to increase knowledge sharing across their preferred platforms.

Whizzard takes video data from the recordings of video conference platforms and allows users to search within and across recordings, and reassemble snippets into new personalised videos to share with colleagues or fellow students.

As an example, Linius said a medical student preparing for final exams could instantly search across the university’s entire catalogue of recorded lectures for mentions of “vaccine race”, spoken by “Professor Davies” in “the month of September” and have all relevant clips automatically stitched together in milliseconds, with this level of granularity delivered back as one custom video to aid the student’s exam preparation.

Another potential use case involved executives in corporate enterprises who do not have time to attend all meetings scheduled in their calendar and require an update on forecast budgets. Using Whizzard, they could search across all Zoom meetings over the “last 14 days” for topics such as “forecasts” and “budgets” by “CFO” and “‘CEO” and have a personalised video returned instantly, summarising the information they need.

Linius’ Whizzard platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which also underpins its artificial intelligence services. AWS is also providing funding support for the product’s marketing efforts via the AWS Partner Network, and Linius is in the process of listing Whizzard on the AWS Marketplace.

In future, Whizzard will be a publicly available platform which customers can subscribe to directly and start using the same day, with no involvement from Linius personnel.

Whizzard is set to be available via the Zoom and Webex marketplaces in about two weeks’ time, following completion of their respective registration processes. Linius partners will also be able to white-label the service as their own value-added application.

Linius partner LiveTiles is already in the process of doing this, currently targeting its existing customers and enterprise organisations globally. It has started a deployment to its first large customer.