Overview of Alexa for the Enterprise

Had been introduced to the concept some time ago, was recently asked my opinion.  It has advanced, but still have not seen any good examples in place.  Depends what you mean by it, and voice has issues in an open office.     But as a background, hands-free information source, I can see it being used.   In the office you could also give it a level of autonomy.  In our case we tested the idea of an assistant listening to  your typing and doing background searches on open and internal data, and then creating links to related information.   Whats changed now is that many people have become used to talking to assistants.

An Alexa for your Business  By Alex Woodie in Datanami

Consumers across the globe have gotten into the habit of asking chatbots like Alexa or Siri simple questions, like “When will it stop raining?” and “Who will start game one for the Padres in this year’s World Series?” Now that level of consumer chatbot experience is coming to the enterprise, enabling employees to get questions to answers about business data.

There are dozens of companies building chatbots for the enterprise, and a handful more that create development kits that let companies build and train their own custom chatbots. Vendors like Botcore.ai, TextIt, Reply.ai, and Kore.ai have created their own chatbots to handle mundane tasks.

Amazon is in the business with Alexa for Business, which is designed to help employees manage their schedule and to-do lists, while Microsoft has Azure Bot Service, which hooks into communication channels, such as Cortana, Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger. Salesforce‘s Einstein bot, meanwhile, is an expert at navigating the hosted CRM app, while Infor‘s Coleman AI can pull answer from some of that company’s ERP systems.

Enterprise Chatting

Another vendor aiming for chatbot supremacy is Jane.ai. The St. Louis, Missouri company’s software is looking to carve itself a niche in the middle of the enterprise, where it can become an expert in answering basic questions from data stored across systems, such as the communication channels mentioned above, Microsoft Sharepoint, Salesforce, and Workday.

“It’s like Siri or Alexa for your workplace,” says Dave Costenaro, the head of AI R&D for Jane.ai. “We’re an AI platform that connects to all of a company’s data, tools, and information, and make it accessible through a conversational interface.”

Users can interact with Jane.ai through Slack or Skype, or through a dedicated app. A user can ask for information such a phone number or email address of a particular connection, or to pull up a file stored in one of the company’s data silos. ... "