On this New Product Alert, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr interviews Michael Tressler of Jabra, recorded live at ISE 2026. They talk about how Jabra is approaching modern collaboration with a focus on simplicity, flexibility, and AI-enabled audio and video experiences across meeting rooms and personal workspaces.
Craig Durr: Hey, Michael Tressler.
Michael Tressler: Hey, Craig. How are you doing?
Craig Durr: How's it going?
Michael Tressler: I'm doing all right.
Craig Durr: Good! I had a chance to talk to Olly. He told me I should come see you, then you can show me some of these brand new toys of yours. What do you think?
Michael Tressler: I can. I'm super excited.
Craig Durr: Are you?
Michael Tressler: Yeah
Craig Durr: Well, good. Tell me what you got here.
Michael Tressler: So what we have here is our Jabra Room Kit. It’s expandable depending on how you want it, and it's very much a plug and play. So you can have one piece, or doing the math, seven pieces, depending on how much you want.
We can start with the base. This is the PanaCast 55 VBS. We released the PanaCast 50 VBS a year and a half ago. In order to handle the additional power needed for this large room solution, we had to rev the hardware a little bit. But for the most part, it's the same camera, speakers, and microphones as on the 50. But a few PC ports and USB ports have changed, a little extra power…
Craig Durr: More I/O, more power, more compute… all that, right?
Michael Tressler: Right, so you can start and just buy this.
Craig Durr: So that right there would be in this whole spectrum of the small, medium, large…
Michael Tressler: This is a good medium solution. Just buy it, and you're done. But you probably want to do more with it, which is why you buy this instead of the 50. So we'll start with this.
Craig Durr: This is the new SpeakerMic, correct?
Michael Tressler: Yeah, SpeakerMic… not a great name, but it defines exactly what it is—speaker and a microphone.
Okay, so this is the extension audio. I am in pre-sales, and every call is like, “Do you guys have extension audio?” I say, “No,” but now, I can say yes.
This is connected via category cable. We can go up to 30 meters away. There are four microphones, and it's got expansion microphones. You can mute, increase volume, decrease volume, and those kinds of things. And you have now four microphones deeper into the room.
But it's also a speaker, so we've added audio as well. As we're a front-of-room audio device, this now lets us put the audio 20 feet, or however many that is in meters, deeper into the space.
Craig Durr: But we are in Europe, I think we might have to talk and…
Michael Tressler: Yeah, so let's say, it’s like eight meters.
Craig Durr: Okay, we'll round. Don't test us on math.
Michael Tressler: This is a magnet attached. That is an acoustic cone—it’s a word I learned today. I always called it the mountain
Craig Durr: So it's actually helping out with that speaker on top, right?
Michael Tressler: Yes, here's the speaker, and it's downward firing.
Craig Durr: Now, I want you to know one thing. When we say this, we're not talking about the person doing it. Is that…
Michael Tressler: It is. I'm the one.
Craig Durr: All right, this is perfect. I love that.
Michael Tressler: Yeah, so downwards firing hits the acoustic cones, shoots the audio around 360 degrees. And there's also the theory of, have you ever, especially in the early days of cell phones, you're listening to some music and you wanted it to be louder, so you put it into a metal pot?
Craig Durr: Yeah, or a cup or something like that. Yes.
Michael Tressler: Same basic concept. This is gonna amplify the audio from the metal, as well as using the table itself to increase the audio.
Craig Durr: Good, so this is here with the medium room solution. But we talked about the medium room expansive... This is where the partnership with Huddly comes in.
Michael Tressler: Yes, this is where we now go, true, large room. This is part of it. This will extend the audio way out... so a 22-person room. We can put it way towards the other end of the space for the audio. But now, we're still limited by our videos. That's where we partnered with our friends at Huddly.
Craig Durr: That's perfect. This is the L1 camera?
Michael Tressler: Yes, it's the Huddly Crew System. So you can buy one, three, or five, depending on how big the room is, what you want to do. You can kind of mix and match. You can buy Huddlys and not have to buy the SpeakerMic. Wow. You can mix and match how you want.
Craig Durr: That’s the room kit—you build a kit that you want to do to get this right.
Michael Tressler: That’s right. That's why there's no product name like the three or the five.
Craig Durr: So now, if we take this in combination with what you guys launched last year, which was the PanaCast 40 VBS, which is that huddle room optimized solution, now we have this in the medium room… medium-ish, larger room. Larger, largest rooms, right? You've now got this great answer for your customers, which say, “Hey, I want to stop at one shop, Jabra, and get all the solutions in place.”
Michael Tressler: The other thing to keep in mind is, as all of this, there's no configuration really required. So they will figure out on their own how the audio is gonna work. Huddly takes care of it themselves, so you do the install and you start using it. There’s no day two, where you have to have the programmer in, configuring it all. It is essentially as close as you can get to plug and play. It's also Android-based. All the larger room solutions tend to be Windows-based. So it's simple, plug and play, Android.
Craig Durr: This is Huddly's first Android solution, I think, that they partner with as well. You know? It also happens that you have the new Scheduler here that came out in the fall.
Michael Tressler: November. Christmas happened.
Craig Durr: This is Christmas all over the place, and this is wonderful. Now, I'm here to talk to you about video, but I can't help seeing that executive jewelry.
Michael Tressler: You haven’t been looking at me the whole time.
Craig Durr: No, I mean.. you are
Michael Tressler: I have deep blue eyes. People say I have amazing, beautiful glasses, and you're looking over my shoulder, not at me.
Craig Durr: What do you have over your shoulder, though?
Michael Tressler: This is the other great thing. Jabra is known as an audio company. We've been doing audio for 150 years. We started with teletype telegraphs 150 years ago. So this is the Jabra Evolve 375. You've got the Evolve 385.
Craig Durr: These are the ones that just launched.
Michael Tressler: Just launched, yeah. What's interesting about these is that they are the first ones from Jabra without a boom arm. So we use a thing called DNN: Dynamic Neural Network. I think it is. We worked with our friends in the hearing aid division. GN, the family, has a hearing aid division. Hearing aids are small; they really need to separate the noise from the voices. We took their ideas, and we have a lot more processing power. What we do is we kind of learn the ambience, and we've traded on a bunch of ambient environments. We just pull it out to focus on the board.
Craig Durr: So what you're doing is you're actually doing this AI processing on device to help. This is AI intelligence that's helping with the audio.
Michael Tressler: That technology is what Jabra finally said, “Let's get rid of the boom arm on some models because we can now provide a boom arm-like experience without the boom arm because of all these new technologies and AIs…
Craig Durr: This is fantastic, and this is geared towards the knowledge worker. I'm happy looking at the higher end model. This is kind of the mid-range model.
Michael Tressler: They're roughly the exact same model. The only difference is, this is on ear, and that is over ear. It depends on your hearing style, which you prefer. We also did a lot and tried to make them not look like dorky office workers. If you're on the plane, if you're walking down the mall, why not wear these? They look good.
Craig Durr: They do. You know, what I like about these also is the really flat profile.
Michael Tressler: Compared to the Evolve 285, it's 40% less. It’s got more power, better audio, and like half the size and weight.
Craig Durr: I had a chance to talk to John about this as well. This is awesome. So when am I gonna get mine?
Michael Tressler: Uhm…
Craig Durr: Abby? Abby says…
Michael Tressler: *laughs* You get paid, right? So you can just buy it.
Craig Durr: No, no, she said she was gonna get me a pair here.
Michael Tressler: Give? Like, give you a link to…
Craig Durr: *laughs* I'll tell you what we'll do. I appreciate the time and energy.
Michael Tressler: It’s always great talking to you.
Craig Durr: Hey, everyone. This is Craig Durr with the Collab Collective. I want to thank you again for joining us here at ISE 2026. This has been like Christmas. I'll see you later.
Michael Tressler: And you're just gonna walk off with those, aren’t you?
Craig Durr: Yeah
Michael Tressler: Security! Security, we have a runner.