Over past few years, voice technologies have grown into home assistants. How will this tie into the way that we work? Will home assistants soon become work assistants? The answer is – they already have. In November 2017, Amazon announced ‘Alexa for Business’. This is a service that allows businesses to bring Alexa into the workplace at scale.
Voice and Visual
When home assistants were initially released, it was only about voice. Since then, new devices have been launched such as the Amazon Echo Show. The Echo Show has everything you get with the other echo devices in terms of Alexa, but with an added screen. In the workplace, such a device would be great for multitasking and video calls. The ability to ask Alexa a question and it displaying Google search results on a screen at your desk is particularly useful if you have no hands free. Depending on how fast you type, some may argue it would be quicker to use your keyboard.
There are two device types Alexa for Business uses:
- Shared Devices
- Personal Devices
Shared Devices
These are the devices you would commonly find in a meeting room, lunch room or shared space area. This would be useful for joining a meeting via a video conference by saying “Alexa, start meeting”. This will turn on appropriate equipment such as microphones, webcams aswell as joining the conference call. Moreover, custom skills can be created to allow employees to ask Alexa which meeting rooms are available.
Personal Devices
Imagine you are in work, it’s Monday morning and you have one million and one things to do. Wouldn’t it be great to have your own personal assistant to pick up some of these tasks? Personal devices can make calls for you, check your schedule, send messages on your behalf and many other useful tricks.
Voice will be a huge part of the workplace in the not so distant future.
At Lawlor Technologies we specialise in building custom Alexa Skills for innovative businesses looking to increase the productivity of workplace tasks, through voice. Contact us if such a service interests you and we will provide more info.