Zoom Rooms and Alexa for Business

 Alexa linking with Zoom Room Appliances.  Collaboration with Zoo,  Voice control of meeting management.  Expanding the uses of Amazon for Business. A good movement forward given the popularity of Zoom for meetings.   And the use of AI to integrate voice and logical management of increasingly complex meetings in the post-pandemic world.  Look forward to give this a try.  

Zoom Rooms and Alexa for Business to Empower Hands-Free Meetings  By Bobby Agarwal  in Amazon Developer

With employees around the country beginning to transition back into physical offices, many teams are making decisions related to how they can prepare their technical infrastructure for the post-pandemic world. One of the recurring themes has been the need for hands-free and voice-controlled meeting rooms. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Gartner predicted that by 2022, 40% of formal meetings will be facilitated by virtual AI and advanced analytics.

Simpler Voice-Controlled Meetings    

Starting today, Alexa will be integrated into Zoom Rooms Appliances and available for organizations of all sizes. This update extends support to Zoom Rooms Appliances manufactured by DTEN, Logitech, Neat, and Poly. By using natural language such as “Alexa, join my meeting,” or “Alexa, find me an available room” administrators can help employees focus on the meeting itself rather than the technology. No more touching screens, switching between technologies, or remembering how to use different devices.

This new offering enables administrators to set up Alexa for Business with a few clicks within the Zoom Rooms portal itself and without having to purchase additional hardware. Once enabled, for an individual room, floor, building, or campus, Zoom Rooms users can ask Alexa to join their scheduled meeting, start a new meeting, book a room for their ad-hoc meeting, or find an available room by simply using their voice. 

“How we work is changing,” said Jeff Smith, Head of Zoom Rooms at Zoom. “By integrating Alexa for Business into Zoom Rooms Appliances, we’re reducing friction for organizations as they look towards ways to bring back their employees safely.”    ... " 

Alexa Further Personalizes AI?

 Considering what this means for me and other users.  A step towards an assistant that can aid and nudge in new ways?  Well no, not that I can see yet in any assistants.    I have been itching for something more proactive, that can be tuned for specific goals and next steps, not just tiny increases in efficiency with routines.  Personally not interested.  As the assistant makers running scared of intrusive AI?   Want more than choosing music. 

Personal Reminders to Your Phone Only   by Eric Hal Schwartz in Voicebot.ai

Alexa users can customize the commands incorporated into Alexa routines. The new feature allowing users to write out their own additions to the combination of commands Alexa carries out when it hears a key phrase. Routine custom actions, along with personalized reminders from the voice assistant pushed to an individual phone, are part of the latest upgrade package for Alexa.  ... "

Turn Your Echo into a Phone

Been placing calls via Alexa for some time, this seems to close the loop.  This seems to open the loop for new kinds of skills that direct, handle, record, manage incoming calls.   A little like Google Duplex?  New abilities for business assistants?  I have an AT&T number so may try this as part of my smart home capabilities.

I saw there are a number of posts here about how Google Duplex links with the Google Assistant ....  so examining that as well.  See the 'Google Duplex Tag' for those posts.

Amazon’s new Alexa partnership lets you link your AT&T number to turn your Echo into a phone

‘Alexa, answer the phone’

By Chaim Gartenberg   @cgartenberg in TheVerge

Amazon is rolling out a new partnership with AT&T today that will let customers link their phone numbers to their Alexa account, allowing them to both make and receive phone calls via their Alexa devices. ... "

Alexa Launches Services for Property Managment

Can expect push back on this regarding privacy.   

Amazon  wants to bring Alexa to property managers. by Sarah Perez in Tech Crunch

The company this morning launched a new service, Alexa for Residential, that aims to make it easier for property managers to set up and maintain Alexa-powered smart home experiences in their buildings, like condos or apartment complexes. At launch, IOTAS, STRATIS, and Sentient Property Services will be among the the first smart home integrators to use the Alexa for Residential service.

The idea is to make Alexa a tool for smart home management, even for those without their own Amazon account. The way the service works, new residents won’t have to purchase their own device or set anything up to get started. Instead, they can just speak to Alexa to control the various smart home features available at their residence and use basic Alexa features. like timers, alarms, or getting information like news and weather.

Property managers can choose to create custom Alexa skills for each unit, allowing the residents to submit maintenance requests, make amenity reservations, or even pay their rent via Alexa .... " 

Amazon and Home Productivity

Interesting non-typical thoughts on this.  via Walter Riker

Boosting Work from Home Productivity with Amazon Alexa  in AWS Amazon  by Sandeep Rao

How I set-up my home for remote work and used Alexa for Business work-based features on my Echo devices to boost my work-from-home productivity

Last year, when I joined the Alexa for Business team as the East Coast representative based out of New York City, I transitioned to working remotely from home in the mornings. When I started working remotely, my productivity suffered as I had not properly setup my home for work. I didn’t have a designated workspace in the apartment and rarely used tools besides my office laptop and kitchen table to get work done. This contrasted with working from the office where I had a height-adjustable Amazon door desk and other tools such as a second screen (display or monitor), a keyboard, a mouse, an ergonomic chair, and good lighting. I quickly realized that I had to make changes to close the gap between productivity in the home vs office.

To improve my productivity, I re-purposed the unused real estate in front of my fireplace as my workspace. This new setup had multiple advantages: (1) the dedicated area allowed me to physically separate work from home; (2) I moved closer to the living room window and benefitted from increased natural light; (3) the fireplace made a great background for Amazon Chime video calls! Though I kept the kitchen table, I swapped out the plastic table chair for an upholstered arm chair and purchased a keyboard and mouse.

Having closed the immediate gap in productivity, I started exploring ways to gain an even greater edge. I had three Amazon Echo devices at home but used them for non-work tasks such as wake-up alarms, music, personal calling, and web browsing. Recently, I had placed my Echo Show, an Alexa-enabled device with a video screen, near my workspace to quickly pull-up non-work information without needing to task switch on my laptop (e.g., “Alexa, what is the weather outside?”, “Alexa, how is the S&P 500 doing?”). I thought; Could I use my personal Echo devices to further boost my work-from-home productivity? I now had deeper insights into the work-based features that are available to all Amazon Alexa users and decided to put those to use.... "

Alexa Knowledge Skills Advance to Existing Templates

Note the capabilities for security in the enterprise, as well as editing and reuse of existing knowledge.  Ultimately if this is done well, it can greatly advance business oriented systems.  Managing the underlying data will still be a challenge.   In the past we built FAQ based systems.  More detail below:

Amazon’s Alexa Knowledge Skills enables voice-guided FAQs, glossaries, and more     By Kyle Wiggers in Venturebeat.

In yet another step toward the enterprise side of the burgeoning conversational intelligence segment, Amazon today launched Alexa Knowledge Skills, a new skill type for its Alexa platform that allows employees and customers to ask questions about an organization’s data without invoking a skill name. It’s available in preview starting today, ahead of general availability in the months to come.

As Alexa senior product marketing manager Ben Grossman explains in a blog post, Alexa Knowledge skills enable folks to ask Alexa about different types of data, including (but not limited to) organization charts, building information, events, FAQs, glossaries, product catalogs, and more. Developing a Knowledge skill requires a spreadsheet of data but no extensive coding or cloud infrastructure, and the skills are privately distributed through Amazon’s Alexa for Business or Alexa for Hospitality services, meaning that they remain accessible only on devices within an organization. ... " 

Google G Suite Adds AI in Beta

Always  looking for ways to integrate smarts into enterprise business designs and tasks,  so this is worth looking at.  Looks like its taking a step ahead of Amazon for Business, given the G Suite's existing infrastructure.

Google adds AI smarts to G Suite with Google Assistant and Docs updates

Google’s AI assistant can now be accessed in beta, while Smart Compose has been extended to Google Docs as well as Gmail.   By Matthew Finnegan

Google’s AI expertise has long been a strength, and the company has been steadily adding machine-learning capabilities to its G Suite platform. The latest move in that effort allows users to access certain G Suite apps with Google Assistant and introduces Smart Compose text suggestions to Google Docs.

Google first announced it would bring its AI voice assistant to G Suite earlier this year; a beta is now under way that lets users manage their Google Calendar schedules with voice commands. This includes the ability to read out calendar entries, as well as create, cancel or reschedule events. G Suite admins can sign up for the beta here.

Users can also send emails to meeting participants, kick off voice and video calls hands-free using Google’s Hangouts Meet app, and interact with the Asus-built Google Hangouts Meet hardware in conference rooms to join and exit meetings and make phone calls..... "

Amazon Debuts Dash Smart Shelf

If pushing the Dash Button was too hard for you, here is the next reordering play from Amazon, the smart shelf that automatically reorders when a shelf has less than a given weight of product.   Unless you are very tidy about where things are put, this is more of an office thing.   And there too,  I have often see many less organized offices.  They have thought ahead  about temporary changes in stock. Perhaps a narrower demand profile than expected.   We did test weight triggered solutions on store shelves to signal out-of-stocks in Grocery.  This further adds another Amazon Alexa presence to the office.  In the link below, pictures of its suggested uses.

Amazon debuts the Dash Smart Shelf to gain a bigger presence in the office   By Maria Deutcher in SiliconAngle

After getting its Echo smart speakers into tens of millions of homes, Amazon.com Inc. is now hoping to establish a bigger presence in the workplace. 

The company on Thursday pulled back the curtains on the Dash Smart Shelf, an internet-connected scale for businesses that automatically reorders office supplies from Amazon when they’re about to run out. Users can place common items like printer paper, pens and notepads atop the device. When the Dash Smart Shelf senses that the weight drops below a certain level, it will purchase a fresh batch of whatever office suppliers it’s holding.

There’s an alternate setting that companies can select to have the scale notify the office manager instead of placing orders on its own. To prevent accidental purchases, Amazon has designed the onboard software to detect if supplies are temporarily removed by a worker.

The Dash Smart Shelf comes in three sizes ranging in size from 7 inches by 7 seven inches to 18 inches by 13 inches. All the versions are one-inch tall and can be powered either via a wall plug or four AAA batteries.  .... "

Alexa, Join My Meeting

Slightly surprising given Google's recent moves, will work with Google Suite and also MS Office, Skype, Zoom, Chime and others.  For a limited time open to all Alexa users,  but apparently later will revert to only subscribers to Alexa for Business.   Have now seen a number of attempts to do conference support and assistance, none yet useful enough, but the assistance possibilities are considerable.

“Alexa, join my meeting” – Join conference calls with Alexa, now open to all Alexa users!  by aakarsh  in AWS  April 4, 2019

Starting today, Alexa device users can join meetings using their existing Alexa devices at home or work by saying “Alexa, join my meeting”! This feature is available for all Alexa users for a limited time, even if their organization does not use Alexa for Business yet. Just say “Alexa, join my meeting” to get started!

Alexa for Business at deskAlexa for Business already enables users to join meetings from conference rooms. Customers who have Alexa devices at home requested us to add the capability to join meetings even without a central deployment of Alexa for Business by their administrator. We are excited to enable this capability today for all Alexa device owners. You can get started by simply saying “Alexa, join my meeting” and following instructions to link your calendar with Alexa. Joining meetings is supported on most Alexa enabled devices that support Alexa Communication and works with a variety of popular conferencing solutions including Amazon Chime, Cisco WebEx, Zoom, and Skype.

By linking your Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, Google Gmail or G Suite, or Apple iCloud calendar via the Alexa app, Alexa will automatically find the next meeting and identify the right meeting ID and PIN numbers so you can join the meeting seamlessly. Once on the call, you can use the mute button to mute or say “Alexa, hang up” to leave the meeting. You can also say “Alexa, press 5” to enter touch tones. Echo Show or Echo Spot owners will join with audio and also see a keypad, the meeting title, call duration, and a hang-up button on screen.   ... "

Templates for Alexa in Business

Finally a movement forward here. To date have not seen much useful in this space.

Amazon’s Alexa for Business Blueprints lets employees make custom voice apps   By Kyle Wiggers @Kyle_L_Wiggers in Venturebeat 

Use Alexa in your place of work? There’s cause for minor celebration: Today marks the launch of Alexa for Business Blueprints, a set of dozens of preconfigured templates for Amazon’s intelligent assistant that let customers create and publish private skills without having to write code. They’re currently available in the U.S., with additional territories presumably on the way.

As Amazon product marketing manager Ben Grossman explains in a blog post, Alexa for Business Blueprints stay within workplaces — they can’t be used on devices outside of an organization — and any employee can use them to submit voice app requests. How? Simply by signing in with an Amazon account, filling in the requests and responses fields, and supplying an Alexa for Business organization identifier (or ARN). It’s up to IT administrators to review and selectively enable apps for rooms (or the entire organization) as they come in. .... "

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. ... "

Alexa Conversationally Constructs Playlists

This is something of interest, playlist conversational construction.  If you think of a playlist as a goal, could this be applied to business efforts?   Was thinking something related for business application, is this far away?  More than just tweaks will be needed, but have already noticed some subtlety in recommendation.    Alexa:  Find a better pricing strategy using the latest data.   A Playlist for Business as a set of choices for a process?

Alexa will pepper you with questions to build better playlists   in Engadget, By Mallory Locklear, @mallorylocklear

Amazon is rolling out a few tweaks to Alexa that will make it easier to find the music you want to hear. By telling Alexa what you like and don't like and by conversing with Amazon's assistant about what you enjoy listening to, Alexa will be able to create more personalized suggestions and playback even when you just say, "Alexa, play music."

If you're looking for Alexa to offer some suggestions for playlists that are tailored to you and what you want, the virtual assistant will now be able to talk to you about what you're looking for. When you say something like, "Alexa, help me find a holiday playlist," or "Alexa, help me find dinner music," Alexa will respond with a few questions to help get a better grasp on what genre, tempo or mood you're hoping to incorporate. Alexa will then customize playback based on how you responded and your past listening history.  ... "

Echo Devices now Support Skype Calling

In further indication of a link between Microsoft and Amazon,  Voice and Video Skype calls can now be made-hands free on Echo devices.  I frequently use Skype for international communications.  Signed up for this and it worked well.  Another move towards Echo for business scenarios.   Text messaging is not yet available, but is coming.

You can now make Skype calls on Amazon Echo devices   By Bruce Brown in DigitalTrends

Just in time for the holiday season, Microsoft and Amazon announced that you can now ask Alexa to make Skype voice and video calls on Echo devices.

In all, 34 countries will soon be Alexa and Skype-enabled. Skype support for the Alexa platform is available now in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Support for other countries will be coming soon, according to Microsoft.

You can use Alexa-enabled devices such as the Echo Plus or Dot to make hands-free Skype voice calls.  ... "

Skype Calling Comes to Alexa Devices

This is quote interesting.  Could make for some interesting applications for business applications that can use assistants.  Part of the Amazon and Microsoft agreement about assistant cooperation talked last year.   How about adding Teams as well?  Finally something that looks to have direct business value.  Look forward to taking a closer look as to how this works.

Skype chats are coming to Alexa devices
Voice controlled internet calls to or from any device with Amazon's system in it.

By Richard Lawler, @Rjcc  in Engadget ... "

Alexa for Business Makes Hotel Room Calls

Hospitality by assistants expands

Alexa for Business can now Make Phone Calls in Hotel Rooms

Khari Johnson in Venturebeat

Volara, the creator of a hotel concierge service powered by AWS’ Alexa for Business, today announced it has extended calling capabilities to hotel guests.

Though Alexa for Business could already initiate video conference calls, more traditional phone calls were not available before today, Volara cofounder and CEO Dave Berger told VentureBeat in an email.

A hotel guest can now say “Alexa, call the concierge” or make calls to mobile or landlines phone numbers in the United States, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. A trial of phone calls with Alexa for Business is currently taking place at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess hotel in Arizona.... " 

GoToMeeting Links to Alexa, Voice Transcription

Like to see the closer integration between voice intelligence and meetings.  A very obvious place to improve meeting efficiency and creating links for meeting supporting knowledge.    But all this needs to be very transparent and error free for it to work for business.

GoToMeeting adds AI transcription features, Amazon Alexa integration
LogMeIn-owned videoconferencing tool also gets text chat function. 
By Matthew Finnegan

LogMeIn has updated its GoToMeeting video and audio conference platform with new features that include a text chat function, AI transcription service and integration with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.

LogMeIn — which also owns cloud meetings tool join.me — acquired GoTo products from Citrix for $1.8 billion in 2016. This immediately positioned the vendor as one of the largest video and web conferencing players, with millions of customers worldwide. .... "

Hands Free Coding Assistance

Like examples where hands-free produces a new and better channel towards a result.   What are they in business?   Does this work in this case? 

Amazon's Virtual Assistant Becomes a Personal Assistant to Software Developers    University of British Columbia

Computer scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada are using Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa to handle routine programming tasks for software engineers, who rely on multiple independent tools to edit, build, and test systems for a single project. UBC's Nick Bradley and his team tested whether Alexa could facilitate this process by allowing software engineers to use conversational language to ask Alexa to complete some tasks. Beyond teaching Alexa key phrases and mapping different commands to the work, the researchers had to identify common multi-step tasks that engineers perform and create a system that could automate those tasks. Engineers who evaluated the system found it useful, but Bradley says using voice commands in an office environment is distracting. The team plans to create a chatbot that would allow engineers to type minimal requests instead of speaking them aloud. ... " 

Alexa adds Better Smart Meetings

Probably essential if they hope to have a credible  Alexa for business.  Will be testing. Most of my issues were regarding the voice to text, rather than the appointment entering.

Alexa gets smart meeting scheduling, a boost to its workplace presence
Amazon says the new Smart Scheduling Assistant feature allows the popular virtual assistant to cut the time needed to manage personal schedules in the office. .... " 
By Matthew Finnegan in Computerworld

via Walter Riker.

AWS Alexa for Business

Been asked to look at AWS/Alexa for Business. A considerable description at the link.  With a number of business case studies.   Initial looks had me think that the voice processing is still not good enough.  Fine for casual use in the home, but repeating yourself in the office is not good.   Ultimately we will using attentive assistants to augment work.

Alexa for Business
Empower your organization with Alexa  ... 

What is Alexa for Business?

Alexa for Business allows organizations of all sizes to introduce Alexa to their workplace. With Alexa for Business, you can use the Alexa you know as an intelligent assistant to stay organized and focus on the work that matters. Alexa helps workers be more productive as they move throughout their day at – home and at their desks as enrolled users with personal devices, and in conference rooms, copy rooms or other shared spaces with shared devices. Alexa for Business includes the tools and controls that administrators need to deploy and manage shared Alexa devices, skills, and users at scale.  .... " 

Alexa Assistants come to the Trading Floor

Another example where hands-free can be very useful, and you need information quickly.   Adding an information channel.

JPMorgan Brings Amazon’s Alexa to Wall Street Trading Floors
By Hugh Son and Katherine Chiglinsky  in Bloomberg Tech

Voice-activated assistant can now send reports from analysts

Other firms such as New York Life using it to help employees
“Alexa, ask JPMorgan what the price target for Apple is.”

It’s a request that JPMorgan Chase & Co. institutional clients can now get quickly answered through Amazon.com Inc.’s ubiquitous voice-activated assistant. The bank and the e-commerce giant have partnered to provide JPMorgan’s Wall Street users with another way to access its research. Alexa is able to send analysts’ reports and related queries, and the bank is testing other features, like providing prices on bonds or swaps, according to David Hudson, global head of markets execution for the New York-based bank.

Voice assistants are “clearly becoming something people are habituated to in their lives,” Hudson said. “It’s about taking information that’s somewhere in the bank, that someone has to generally go and look for, or which is time-consuming or requires authentication to get, and putting that to you in another channel.”  .... "