Alexa devices have been an integral part of households lately. Having a personal voice assistant like Amazon Echo devices has been a common factor across the globe.
Amazon launched its plans for penetrating the same reach into Organizations and office spaces with Alexa for Business.
What is Alexa for Business?
Alexa for Business is a managed service provided on Amazon’s cloud platform AWS.
It has mainly has three components, Alexa Devices, A tool to manage and deploy Alexa devices, and an interface to manage and deploy various private skills.
It also brings more a lot more control on what kind of skills to be published onto the Alexa devices which get deployed into office spaces and it also provides an interface to integrate those skills with various office IT applications and infrastructures.
What Alexa for business can do in the office?
With Alexa for business, Alexa devices can be deployed in two ways, As a Shared device for common spaces like Meeting Rooms, kitchens, lobbies. It can also be deployed as a personal assistant for a specific user for individual productivity tasks.
There are numerous applications of Alexa devices in the office.
Meeting Room Bookings:
A skill can be deployed that enables employees to reserve meeting rooms with Alexa. Employees can ask Alexa things like, “Alexa, find a room for an hour.”
Meetings skills leverage the Alexa for Business room booking API that offers a pre-built voice interaction model. Skill can be configured to have a pre-populated list of rooms based on the office layout.
Directions & Desk Placements
A skill can be deployed to let the new employees to bring up to the speed for the directions within the office space or to find a desk of a colleague.
Housekeeping
A skill can be deployed to let the employees to put requests directly for various housekeeping things like “Alexa, request for papers for Printer 1” or “Alexa,ask admin to refill the coffee”.
It can also be used to register any issues related to various office spaces.
Office Automation
Alexa for Business can also be used to control various smart devices like Lights, Thermostats, Blinds, etc.
Flash Briefings
Alexa for business deployed for specific users would allow doing various productivity tasks like publishing flash briefings to chart out their daily meeting plans, due tasks and etc.
Alexa with BI
A skill can also be deployed to integrate with various enterprise applications like business intelligence tools to bring various stats or reports right away by voice-based queries.
How does it work?
After registering a company for Alexa for business, Using a link provided by the company’s Alexa for Business administrator, anyone from the organization can deploy the skills into the company’s Alexa skill network either from the existing Blueprints or a custom skill to execute various operations.
All that’s needed to submit a skill to your organization is an Amazon account and the Alexa for Businesses organization identifier (also known as an ARN) provided by the organization’s IT admin. That means that anyone at the office can contribute to creating useful Alexa skills for the organization.
How to Get Started with Alexa for Business?
Alexa for business is currently available only in the USA region. To start using Alexa for business, A company needs to register for it using their AWS account, and once that’s done various Alexa devices need to be registered into the same account.
Pricing for Alexa for business is 7$ per device and 3$ for an enrolled user.
If you’re looking to see how voice assistants like Alexa could make an impact in your organization, We are an Alexa Skill Development Company, we’d love to talk.
References
- Images: Alexa for Business – Amazon
