A Virtual Meeting System for the New Age

With the growth of virtual organisations and multinational companies, virtual collaboration tasks are becoming more important for employees because the cost of business travels remains high. In this paper, a proposal is presented to create a virtual meeting system that can use artificial intelligent components to support participants and help to produce effective and better meeting outcomes or to save time by doing tasks in the background for users. A belief that the new age of collaborative environments should consist of intelligent features led to the development of a stable prototype V-ROOM that can be used to test how and if artificial intelligence can facilitate each meeting participant according to her/his formal meeting role and also, if it can facilitate the pre and post meeting tasks. The development is based on previous work, which involved testing the system in a classroom setting and making appropriate improvements. The results of a review and a comparison of virtual meeting systems are presented. The final development of the meeting system will be based on feedback received from professionals in various domains. The findings so far highlight that intelligent systems are needed, especially since information that individuals have to know and process, is vast. One of the main issues that needs to be overcome is that current artificial intelligence is not able to provide totally reliable information, and for this reason in some circumstances, it could hinder a meeting´s effectiveness. Thus it is contended that artificial intelligence should be used only as an assisting tool. The survey results showed that meeting summarisation is one of the most important new features that should be added to virtual meeting systems.