AWS announces Alexa for Business

- New AWS service makes it easy for companies to voice-enable their offices with Alexa

- Salesforce, Concur, Polycom, RingCentral, and Splunk are among the companies with solutions that work with Alexa for Business

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, announced Alexa for Business, a new AWS service that provides every employee with an intelligent assistant to simplify their interactions with the technology around them at work.

Source: Amazon e-marketplace. The Alexa for Business starter kit costs US$709.93.

Alexa for Business can help automate tasks like starting conference calls, controlling conference room equipment, scheduling meetings, keeping track of tasks, or reordering supplies. Alexa for Business also supports a large and growing list of new skills and integrations from companies like Salesforce, Concur, and Polycom that extend Alexa for Business’s functionality into the popular applications and devices customers already use in the workplace.

Companies can easily tailor Alexa for Business by building custom “private” skills that integrate with a customer’s IT applications and office systems. To help customers easily voice-enable their offices, Alexa for Business includes the tools to set up and manage Alexa devices, enroll users, and assign skills at scale.

AWS points out that using office activities can be relatively complex and require multiple steps, from making sure that a room is available, to turning on equipment, and entering passwords. Alexa for Business helps solve many of these hassles as a voice-enabled intelligent assistant. Alexa for Business can help workers manage calendars, keep up with to-do lists, and make phone calls. Around the office, Alexa for Business can handle tasks like notifying IT of an equipment issue, or finding and booking an open conference room.

“Tens of millions of people already count on Alexa at home, in their cars, and on mobile devices to answer questions, provide news and information, and stay connected to friends and family,” said Peter Hill, Director, Productivity Applications, AWS. “Alexa for Business extends the simplicity of voice control to the workplace, while adding powerful tools to help businesses deploy and manage devices, create skills, and deliver voice-first experiences in a scalable way—all backed by the AWS Cloud.”

Customers can set up shared Alexa devices in common areas around the workplace and manage these devices, enroll users, and assign skills from the AWS Management Console. With shared Alexa devices, users can start and end meetings in conference rooms by saying “Alexa, start/end the meeting.” Alexa will automatically dial into the meeting using an Alexa device as a speakerphone or existing videoconferencing equipment. Individual users can also use Alexa for Business from their desks to automatically dial into conference calls, check their upcoming appointments, and schedule or cancel meetings. Alexa for Business works with Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, and Google G Suite.

Solution and software providers, including Salesforce, Concur, SuccessFactors, ServiceNow, Splunk, Acumatica, Tact, Polycom, Crestron, RingCentral, Teem, Twine, and Zoom, are integrating their business applications with Alexa for Business or developing skills that will allow users to accomplish all kinds of tasks with simple phrases like:

“Alexa, ask RingCentral to read me my voicemail.”
“Alexa, ask Salesforce for the current status of my team's big deals scheduled to close this quarter.”
“Alexa, ask Concur when my flight leaves.”
“Alexa, ask SuccessFactors to file paid time off for November 28 and 29, 2017.”
“Alexa, ask Splunk how many Amazon EC2 instances are running in our South America region.”
“Alexa, ask Cloudwatch to tell me about any alarms.”

Additionally, customers can leverage the tens of thousands of public skills available for Alexa today, and create new private ones for their employees by using the Alexa Skills Kit and the Alexa for Business APIs. By building their own Alexa skills, companies can easily voice-enable the workplace, and let Alexa help with common everyday tasks like providing directions to people’s offices, finding open meeting rooms, checking relevant transportation schedules, ordering supplies, reporting building problems, or notifying IT of an equipment issue.

Brooks Brothers, a global retailer of men's and women's apparel and accessories with footprints in Asia and the Middle East is already successfully using Amazon Chime for productive online meetings, the company said. "With Alexa for Business, we are now using Alexa to simplify our conference room experience,” said Philip Miller, CISO, Brooks Brothers. “Alexa takes care of all the details by allowing us to begin meetings with the simple voice command, ‘Alexa, start the meeting.’ Not only does Alexa for Business make it easy for me to provision and manage Echo devices throughout my office, but also configure them to work with Amazon Chime and my existing conference room audio-visual/videoconferencing (AV/VC) equipment.”
Amazon Chime, a managed unified communications service, was made available to all customers in February 2017.

WeWork provides and manages 10 million sq ft of shared workspaces, technology startup subculture communities, and services for entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups, small businesses and large enterprises. The company has a number of outlets in Asia, including in Singapore, India and China. “At WeWork, we are focused on building the space of the future and creating the best experience for our employees and members,” said Dave Fano, Chief Growth Officer, WeWork.

“Alexa for Business is helping us move towards our greater vision of a smart, connected space that responds to your needs. With the private skills that we’ve built, Alexa can reserve conference rooms, file help tickets, and start meetings. Alexa for Business makes it easy for us to configure and deploy both Alexa devices and the skills we need to improve our employee’s productivity. We’re excited to soon offer these same conveniences to our members.”

Salesforce is the global customer relationship management (CRM) leader. “For more than 18 years, companies have turned to Salesforce for the latest innovations that will enable them to build deeper, more meaningful relationships with their customers," said Ryan Aytay, EVP, Business Development & Strategic Accounts, Salesforce. “We are thrilled to be a part of the Alexa for Business launch and to provide our customers exciting new channels to get business done faster and build closer connections with their own customers.”

Concur is the provider of travel, expense and invoice management solutions. “Conversational interfaces are one of the fastest-growing opportunities in tech, opening entirely new channels of communication possibilities,” said John Dietz, VP, Concur Labs. “The Concur Skill for Alexa for Business, now available in preview, allows users to ask Alexa questions specific to their travel itinerary for an upcoming business trip. For example, if a snow storm has you worried about a delayed flight, you can say ‘Alexa, ask Concur: what is my departure time?’”

Polycom helps more than 400,000 organisations unleash the power of human collaboration. “As the market leader in making video calls simple and easy to use, Polycom is excited to take the next step with natural language by demonstrating Alexa voice control with our RealPresence Group Series video conferencing products,” said Greg Pelton, CTO of Polycom. “Polycom was the first to make one-touch control to join a video conference call, and by simply saying “Alexa, join the meeting,” you will have the ability to easily and simply join a video conference using only your voice. We are in limited trials with select customers today, and know users will love this great, simple experience when it comes to market.”

Gartner said that the announcement extends the value of virtual personal assistants (VPAs) to enterprise applications and professional user experiences:

·        As a communications tool that makes conferencing (through services like Skype for Business, Webex, or Amazon Chime) easy;

·        As a voice interface to business calendars, to set up and prioritise daily schedules;

·        As an organiser of daily professional tasks and objectives

"Alexa devices now are able to connect to your scheduled conference call without punching in access numbers and passwords (especially useful for hands-free experiences like commuting in your car). While at the office, open APIs into existing unified communications platforms and hardware devices (Cisco IP phones, Polycom speakers etc) will enable hands-free, voice-controlled interactions by simply connecting an Amazon Echo device," he said, adding that employees can link their personal Alexa account with their organisation’s in order to access Alexa for Business on all devices, at home and at work," said Werner Goertz, Research Director at Gartner.

Goetz observed that integration with the Microsoft platform ensures that users will be productive almost immediately.  "Connecting to a Microsoft Exchange service account will give Alexa access to employees’ business calendars. This is done through the Alexa for Business systems administrator console. Meetings with a colleague or other personal contact can be set up via voice. Other calendar applications such as O365 or Gmail calendars that support OAuth are natively supported, and timely meeting reminders can be proactively spoken out by Alexa," he said.

Goetz also predicted that the announcement could have far-reaching impacts:

·        IT managers’ ability to assign or restrict access rights to enterprise resources (ERP data, documents, corporate data etc) via Alexa will enable more artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled applications;

·        System administrators’ device setup and control features will allow VPA devices to be deployed in volume at conference rooms, office desks or corporate lobbies;

·        Employees’ ability to link personal Alexa accounts and skills with business applications will provide personalised experiences, even when brought into the professional realm;

·        Enterprises’ ability to define “private skills”, i.e. experiences that are specific to one particular company, and accessible only to its employees, point to a deeper integration between VPAs and bespoke enterprise applications.

 

"Amazon’s announcement is a beginning: we are still lacking many necessary features such as voice biometric authentication and speaker recognition from shared office devices, scheduling a call for more than one recipient, and Alexa commands for standard conferencing functions (muting, recording, transfer of presentation rights etc)," he said. 

"But look at it this way: Echo devices were first introduced to consumers as media players, and look at how many other experiences we enjoy now! Just think about it: Amazon also announced transcription and translation services that could one day be integrated into applications that manage calls, take meeting minutes and make these transcriptions available in other languages. Alexa For Business, though limited in scope today, points to opportunities for deeper integration and workplace productivity enhancements in the future.

 

"Now’s the time to start thinking about the efficiencies and productivity enhancements that voice can bring to your workplace."
 
Details:

US customers can now bring Alexa to their workplace with the Alexa for Business Starter Kit. Availability information for the rest of the world has not yet been released. Each kit includes three second-generation Amazon Echo devices for use in conference rooms, two
second-generation Echo Dot devices for controlling equipment in large conference rooms, and two Echo Show devices for desktop use.