In November, Amazon announced the Alexa For Business, which brings theincreasingly popular intelligent personal assistant device from yourliving room to your office.
While the Alexa device in your house offers an array of features thatallow you to control your home as well as manage your lifestyle, theAlexa For Business provides the same functionality for commercialpurposes.
In a fast-paced and continually evolving marketplace, businesses arelooking to reduce the time and money spent on repetitive and tedioustasks. Whereas we are now used to multi-screen displays to assistthroughout the working day, Alexa For Business introduces the voice as amore direct and efficient alternative to visual input. While there are avariety of voice assistants to choose from – Apple Siri, MicrosoftCortana and Google Assistant – Alexa for Business is Amazon’s attempt atspecifically dominating the commercial market.
Alexa For Business helps around the workplace with a similar set offeatures as the home version, with the addition of enabling shared andpersonal devices. Shared devices can provide conferencing abilities;from finding an available meeting room, turning on room lights to startthe meeting as well as helping with tasks such as ordering supplies ornotifying of equipment shortages. Personal devices within the workplacecan be used to schedule meetings, keep track of your to-do list, makephone calls or get information quickly, such as sales data. Your Alexacan be tailored to use the features that suit your business needs, usingthe administration tool to set up a group of devices at a time.
Amazon have marketed this platform as an affordable alternative to apersonal assistant. Alexa stands in place of a company secretary who canhelp run your office, organise your business tasks and even providehuman resource tasks. Although the development of software hasstreamlined administrative duties, Amazon provides a platform to takethis to the next level. Instead of logging into a piece of software andimmediately accessing your to-do list for the day, you can now directlyask Alexa this as soon as you walk into your office while making yourmorning coffee. This example shows the technology functioning at itsbest by increasing working day productivity.
The Alexa For Business services has opened up the opportunity for amultitude of skills that businesses can use to be more productive. Theintroduction of Alexa For Business has sparked an exciting era for thetechnology industry and software development companies. Developers arenow exploring how they can integrate Alexa with their software and howthe device can enable their uses to improve the interaction withsoftware products. This excitement is a reminder of the release ofApple’s iPhone when there was a demand and expectation for softwarecompanies to produce an app alongside their leading product.
There are arguments that Alexa is probably a costly nice-to-have inbusiness, but it will be intriguing to see if there will be anexpectation and demand for software developers to produce skillsalongside their products and apps. The fundamental questions are “Willthis improve business productivity?” and “Is it cost-effective?” Onlytime will tell, and we may see other tech companies following suit.
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