Small businesses are building on the potential Amazon Echo devices offer by buying into Alexa for Business. The new service allows employees to use the AI assistant to streamline and automate work production. It also enables employees to join meetings and carry out certain tasks from home or other remote locations by using their personal Alexa device.
Amazon Alexa for Business
Bringing Things Together Under One Roof
Alexa for Business corrals data from user accounts, devices and skills in your small business and brings everything together under one digital roof. Off the top, it’s touted as a great way to simplify what can be an otherwise complicated conference room meeting.
Not only does it let you use your voice to begin and start these meetings. You can also control connected conference equipment.
Providing Small Businesses with a Way to Connect
It’s a great way for small businesses to connect with employees working on projects from home or somewhere on the road. It can draw from a calendar meeting to notify everyone involved or prompt the people you need to contact through equipment providers like Cisco telepresence.
Allowing Alexa to do the Talking
One of the other big advantages to small businesses is the fact that Alexa can talk to authorized Amazon Echo devices. By asking Alexa to start the meeting, you can program in aspects like which pieces of equipment will get switched on and what number to dial into to get a conference call underway.
Allowing Employees to Connect with You
Employees can even attend from Alexa speakers placed on their desk. It’s another big advantage for those small businesses who want to be able to get direct input from people working on projects involving more than emails or instant messaging.
Allowing Collaborations throughout your Company
This is one of the big draws that’s great for small businesses who have lots of meetings. If you’re the kind of organization that needs to pull proposals together from one end of the building to another, this service is for you.
There are some other advantages. For example, if there are a variety of different Amazon Echo devices assigned to each conference room, this service can even find the open one to save time and energy.
Connecting Echo to your WiFi
On the technical side, Alexa for Business allows your small business to connect Echo devices managed by this AI product to a WPA2 or WiFi Network. This new feature is a must have for businesses that want to have everything on their own secure WPA2 network for security reasons.
Although the service is gaining some traction now with SMBs who have remote employees or clients who require routine updates, Alexa for Business was first launched at re:Invent in 2017, where the notion of using Alexa to help workers be more productive first took off.
Putting Together Different Campaigns
Smaller marketing companies are always trying to put together different campaign ideas from within their company. Sometimes it’s hard to pull everyone together who needs to sign off on any kind of project. That’s where Alexa for business rises up again with the schedule on meeting option. Alexa can go through anyone’s calendar and look for the best place to set up an appointment.
When the invitation is accepted, everyone is notified.
Small business owners are constantly challenged for time. Even sole proprietors who’ve bought a smart phone to help funnel their emails into one place don’t necessarily have time to read them all. Just working through the day to day of your small business operations usually takes up all of your time.
Connecting Alexa to your Email
With this new service, you can even get Alexa to look after all of those emails for you. Getting started is easy. Once your work email is linked to your personal Alexa device, all you need to do is input a set of commands to get the most from this virtual assistant.
Alexa will read your priority emails for you and search for anything specific that might have wound up in the spam folder. If Alexa finds something that you find particularly important, she’ll even read it out loud for you
Alexa for Business doesn’t have any long-term commitments or up-front fees. You can learn more about this pay-as-you-go-service here.
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This article, “Can Alexa for Business Help Your Company?” was first published on Small Business Trends