In November, Amazon announced the Alexa For Business, which brings the
increasingly popular intelligent personal assistant device from your
living room to your office.
While the Alexa device in your house offers an array of features that
allow you to control your home as well as manage your lifestyle, the
Alexa For Business provides the same functionality for commercial
purposes.
In a fast-paced and continually evolving marketplace, businesses are
looking to reduce the time and money spent on repetitive and tedious
tasks. Whereas we are now used to multi-screen displays to assist
throughout the working day, Alexa For Business introduces the voice as a
more direct and efficient alternative to visual input. While there are a
variety of voice assistants to choose from - Apple Siri, Microsoft
Cortana and Google Assistant - Alexa for Business is Amazon’s attempt at
specifically dominating the commercial market.
Alexa For Business helps around the workplace with a similar set of
features as the home version, with the addition of enabling shared and
personal devices. Shared devices can provide conferencing abilities;
from finding an available meeting room, turning on room lights to start
the meeting as well as helping with tasks such as ordering supplies or
notifying of equipment shortages. Personal devices within the workplace
can be used to schedule meetings, keep track of your to-do list, make
phone calls or get information quickly, such as sales data. Your Alexa
can be tailored to use the features that suit your business needs, using
the administration tool to set up a group of devices at a time.
Amazon have marketed this platform as an affordable alternative to a
personal assistant. Alexa stands in place of a company secretary who can
help run your office, organise your business tasks and even provide
human resource tasks. Although the development of software has
streamlined administrative duties, Amazon provides a platform to take
this to the next level. Instead of logging into a piece of software and
immediately accessing your to-do list for the day, you can now directly
ask Alexa this as soon as you walk into your office while making your
morning coffee. This example shows the technology functioning at its
best by increasing working day productivity.
The Alexa For Business services has opened up the opportunity for a
multitude of skills that businesses can use to be more productive. The
introduction of Alexa For Business has sparked an exciting era for the
technology industry and software development companies. Developers are
now exploring how they can integrate Alexa with their software and how
the device can enable their uses to improve the interaction with
software products. This excitement is a reminder of the release of
Apple’s iPhone when there was a demand and expectation for software
companies to produce an app alongside their leading product.
There are arguments that Alexa is probably a costly nice-to-have in
business, but it will be intriguing to see if there will be an
expectation and demand for software developers to produce skills
alongside their products and apps. The fundamental questions are "Will
this improve business productivity?" and "Is it cost-effective?" Only
time will tell, and we may see other tech companies following suit.
If you’re interested providing efficient service to customers using a powerful, cloud-based business process management system, get in touch with us today, for a free, no-obligation demonstration.