Alexa will be coming to an office near you as Amazon is ready to do business and send Alexa to work.
Amazon's Alexa is the most prominent voice interface on the market and it's ready to go to the next level, reasserting its dominance by joining the enterprise. Alexa for Business will give Amazon a significant edge against Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant. It has the potential to greatly improve the office.
Alexa for Business
Announced at Amazon's AWS Reinvent conference, Alexa for Business wants to allow companies to build their own Alexa skills and integrations depending on their needs and workplace environment.
There is a slew of Alexa skills that make things easier for Amazon Echo users and Alexa for Business aims to bring that same level of convenience and usefulness to the office as well.
Alexa Skills For Work
Developers will be able to build Alexa skills for their own company, enabling people to manage accounts, clients, employee directories, appointments, and others such, simply via voice commands. It would help save time and hassle which, in turn, could notably improve efficiency.
Alexa for Business will also be able to do everything an Amazon Echo speaker can do. These include setting the room temperature, switching the lights on or off, setting alarms, offering information about the weather, and so on.
Alexa For Business Benefits
For Amazon, this could be really lucrative because it would make it even more appealing to heavy-weight business customers, which would translate to additional revenue and data.
Enterprise, meanwhile, will be able to better handle their business and their customers with specific skills and APIs tailored to their exact needs. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Concur has already created a skill that enables users to give the voice command "ask concur" when they're about to fly on a business trip. The publication further states that businesses will be able to create apps and skills for a range of tasks, whether it's ordering more office supplies, setting up the meeting room schedule, or more.
With Alexa for Business, users will also be able to access work information even if they're not at the office anymore, as the Alexa mobile app would do the trick. Nevertheless, to take advantage of Alexa for Business, companies would have to purchase Amazon Echo speakers in droves. Considering that digital assistants and smart speakers are on the rise, that might not be a problem for Amazon.
