After I learned about the simultaneous interpretation feature in Webex, I described it to my colleagues, fellow Ukrainian interpreters, in Facebook groups and elsewhere. There has been a lot of interest in this new feature. (Remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) has recently been on the rise worldwide, the current COVID-19 pandemic being just one of the reasons.) I asked Igor Sukaylo, Cisco's UC lead in Ukraine, for information and support. He and his colleague, Sergii Popov, organized a test session first, with me and two other Ukrainian colleagues interested in Webex. In a couple of days, there was another test session, with two other colleagues. In the meantime, I received a Webex license, and on December 6 I used it to organize and run a test meeting with more than 20 fellow Ukrainian interpreters. I appointed roughly half of my colleagues as English<>Ukrainian interpreters, and the other half as English<>Russian ones, so we even tried relay interpretation, with English as the "pilot language" (also called "hub language").
There has been a huge interest among my colleagues in Webex as a platform for remote interpretation. They discussed some ideas for further improvements, which I will describe soon here in the Community and on http://ciscocollabcustomer.ideas.aha.io/. All in all, the meeting has been very useful for everybody. I would like to thank again Igor Sukaylo and the whole Ukrainian office of Cisco for this opportunity to test Webex. Many thanks also go to Sergii Popov for all technical discussions and support. As far as I understand, it is expected that a special offer for Ukrainian market will be published by Cisco's Ukrainian partner in several days, and my colleagues, Ukrainian interpreters, will be able to buy Webex licenses and organize meetings for their clients.
