The translation system will be able to scale beyond two-way meetings, according to Cisco. De Beer gave the example of a TelePresence session among participants from four countries, speaking in four different languages. Each would be able to hear and read everyone's words in his or her own language, he said.

Around the same time that the translation system becomes available, Cisco will offer a transcription feature for the Media Experience Engine to perform speech-to-text conversion of video content. This will create a searchable word-for-word transcript and allow users to go directly to the spot in a video they want to see, the company said.