New AWS service makes it easy for companies to
voice-enable their offices with Alexa, giving workers an
intelligent assistant
Capital One, Brooks Brothers, and WeWork among
the customers using Alexa for Business
Salesforce, Concur, Polycom, RingCentral, and
Splunk are among the companies with solutions that work with Alexa
for Business
Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services,
Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN),
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—in conference
rooms, at their desks, and around the office. 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. To get started with
Alexa for Business, visit:
https://aws.amazon.com/alexaforbusiness/.
Today, people spend too much of their days on tedious tasks at
work—dialing into meetings, managing their calendars, or searching
for information. And, the office technologies designed to help
employees stay productive often just add to the load. For example,
beginning a meeting in a conference room can take multiple steps;
workers have to make sure that the room is available, turn on the
video conference equipment, search for dial-in information, and
enter passwords. Sometimes, just starting a meeting can take five
to ten minutes—if it works at all. There are also many tasks around
the office that can be time consuming or frustratingly difficult to
figure out, such as finding and scheduling an open conference room,
getting someone to fix a broken piece of office equipment, or
locating a coworker’s office. Alexa for Business helps solve many
of these hassles by allowing people to use their voices to interact
with technology throughout their workdays. As an intelligent
assistant at work, Alexa for Business makes starting a conference
call as simple as asking Alexa to “start the meeting.” 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—all with just a few
words.
“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—conference rooms, huddle rooms, lobbies, and
communications centers—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 video conferencing equipment. Alexa for Business can also
voice-enable conference room features, including the lights and
video conferencing 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
utterances 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.
Capital One, a leading information-based technology company and
digital banking innovator, has taken a cloud-first approach to
software development. “Our technology leaders expect always-on
visibility into AWS infrastructure performance across our lines of
business,” said Surya Avirneni, Master Software Engineer, Capital
One. “As part of the developer preview, we built a private Alexa
for Business skill that allows our teams to quickly check the
status on our systems, or to request specific updates on high
severity events, but we needed a way to make this available to our
teams without publishing it in the Alexa Skills Store. Alexa for
Business allows us to publish skills for internal use only, and the
Alexa for Business APIs enable us to build skill discovery and
self-enrollment capabilities for our associates.”
Founded in New York in 1818, Brooks Brothers is one of America's
oldest brands and a leading global retailer of men's and women's
apparel and accessories. “At Brooks Brothers, our employees are
already successfully using Amazon Chime for productive online
meetings. 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 AV/VC equipment.”
WeWork provides and manages 10 million square feet of shared
workspaces, technology startup subculture communities, and services
for entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups, small businesses and
large enterprises. “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 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 world’s leading 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, Vice
President, 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 organizations 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.”
Vonage is a leading provider of cloud communications services
for consumers and businesses. "Vonage is committed to using cloud
communication services to deliver Better Business Outcomes to our
customers by enabling businesses to be more productive every day
from anywhere,” said Omar Javaid, Vonage Chief Product Officer,
Vonage. “Vonage already offers business customers Amazon Chime Pro,
and now, our customers can use Alexa for Business to start meetings
instantly with a single voice command—all of which is part of our
commitment to helping businesses use communications technology to
transform how they work. At Vonage, we are also using Alexa for
Business to start our Amazon Chime meetings in 20 conference rooms
today, and we will be rolling it out to our offices across the
country in 2018.”
Customers in the US can bring Alexa to their workplace starting
today with the Alexa for Business Starter Kit. Each kit includes
the following:
- 3 Amazon Echo (2nd generation) devices
for use in conference rooms
- 2 Echo Dots (2nd generation) devices
for controlling equipment in large conference rooms
- 2 Echo Show devices, perfect for
desktop use
Additional details on the Alexa for Business Starter Kit are
available at https://www.amazon.com/alexaforbusiness.
About Amazon Web Services
For more than 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s
most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers
over 100 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases,
networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence
(AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, and
application development, deployment, and management from 44
Availability Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic regions in the U.S.,
Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan,
Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions
of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing
startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to
power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs.
To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather
than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to
operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews,
1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment
by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets,
Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and
services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit
www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.
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