Alexa, Siri doing wonders for your business!

There is a wide range of opportunities for enterprises to take advantage of voice assistants. Apart from being used to provide enhanced customer support by delivering convenience and personalization to consumers, voice assistants proved their value for administrative use cases. Operating like virtual colleagues, voice assistants automate low-value tasks like scheduling meetings, setting reminders and assisting with conference call set-up.

Alexa For Business:

Alexa for Business is a service that enables organizations and employees to use Alexa to get more work done. With Alexa for Business, employees can use Alexa as their intelligent assistant to be more productive in meeting rooms, at their desks, and even with the Alexa devices they already use at home or on the go. IT and facilities managers can also use Alexa for Business to measure and increase the utilization of the existing meeting rooms in their workplace.

Benefits

Enterprise assistants will soon cease to be an option and, if done right, can transform the workplace culture fundamentally:

Improve Meeting Rooms Experience

Alexa for Business lets employees reserve meeting rooms and start conference calls using intuitive voice commands. Employees don’t need to use remote controls and manually dial-in to meetings, or look up room availability on the calendar. Employees can just say “Alexa, join the meeting” to start their online meeting, “Alexa, is this room booked?” to find if the meeting room is free, “Alexa, who booked the room”, to find who made the booking and “Alexa, book the room” to quickly book a meeting room. Alexa for Business can also provide end-of-meeting reminders a few minutes prior to the start of the next meeting. This encourages employees to end their meetings on time and allows the next meeting to start in a timely manner.

Increase Meeting Rooms Utilization

Often, meeting rooms are reserved but not used, leading to poor utilization of expensive assets and employee frustration. Alexa for Business can automatically release booked yet unattended meeting room reservations after a chosen time period, making meeting rooms available to your employees when they need them. Alexa for Business automatically tracks meeting rooms metrics like attendance rate, recovered bookings, and most and least used rooms, which you can download and analyze to optimize the meeting rooms space at your workplace.

Recruitment Voice Assistant

Another use-case for voice assistants that can relieve HR employees from mundane work is recruitment: a voice assistant can provide information about vacancies and job descriptions on the phone or via other channels. Just AI designed a solution that enabled an insurance company to automate the job application process. The company implemented a recruitment voice assistant that makes real-time updates to the list of vacant positions, recognizes returning applicants, provides information about job descriptions and fills in curriculum vitae forms for new candidates.

Enhance Employee Productivity

Alexa for Business lets your employees be more productive throughout their day at work, at home or on the go. With a few simple set-up steps, employees can link their email & calendars with Alexa. They can then ask Alexa to join online meetings, schedule or re-schedule calendar meeting events, inform meeting participants if they are running late or get work briefings to prepare for their work day. These are Alexa for Business powered features that are available from personal or workplace enrolled Alexa devices.

Voice Enabled Applications

Voice offers a more intuitive way to access business applications. With Alexa for Business, IT teams can build custom skills that add a voice interface to applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, or any of your custom apps and services. IT teams can provide rich, personalized voice experiences that redefine the way employees get work done. Custom skills can be selectively enabled in conference rooms or for employees to use on their personal devices.

How it Works

Alexa for Business utilizes information about the devices, user accounts, and skills in your organization. When someone in your organization asks Alexa a question, Alexa uses this information to respond or perform the requested action. For example, when a user says “Alexa, start the meeting” in a conference room, Alexa uses the location of the device, the calendar information for the room, and

the type of video conferencing equipment available, all stored in your Alexa for Business account, to start the meeting.

Siri For Business:

Siri, Apple’s cheeky AI-powered personal assistant for iOS devices, Apple Watch, the Mac and even Apple TV, is almost a way of life for many entrepreneurs and small businesses. That’s because Siri is a handy situational sidekick that doesn’t bug you when you don’t need it, but is ready to serve when you do. With it, you can use your voice or keyboard to easily accomplish multistep processes.

The future of enterprise voice services involves much more than asking Apple Watch to turn off your lights.

It’s easy to get started using Siri for routine tasks throughout the day: You can call business associates, email or text clients, set or change appointments or alarms, or get directions to your next meeting. It’s also useful for everyday information that would otherwise require searching or tapping through menus, such as current weather conditions and stock prices. Siri’s diverse prowess encompasses contextual reminders (doing something at a certain time or location), word definitions, math equations and finding the best lunch place.

Benefits

Now that you’ve enabled and set up Siri on your devices, here are some ways to put Siri to work for your company.

Company listing and Home Kit

As smartphones proliferate and voice search gets smarter, more and more people seeking local services are using Siri rather than a web search engine. To that end, make sure your company is present on popular maps such as Apple Maps and Google Maps, as well as sites like Yelp, Google Places, Foursquare and Citysearch. Reviews and ratings on local sites help your company get noticed by Siri.

If you have a HomeKit office setup, Siri can take the tedium out of opening and closing up shop each day by locking and unlocking the door, controlling the lights, starting up printers, or adjusting the thermostat in different locations.

Banking and Payments

Siri lets you verbally send money to vendors or suppliers via apps such as Venmo, PayPal and Square Cash, or through iMessage. For example, you can say, “Send Ken $200 with Venmo.” No need to download an app – just use the cards you already have in Wallet. You can even move money between checking and savings accounts. Apple Pay functionality with Siri is on the horizon.

Translation and Reminders

You’re not always at your desk. Sometimes you may be traveling abroad for meetings or conventions – or perhaps your own vendors are non-English speakers. With iOS 11, Siri helps you communicate with people in their own language in the new beta Translate feature.If you say, “How do you say ‘hello’ in Dutch?” Siri responds by speaking the translation aloud. Siri can also translate longer phrases, so your listener can hear your response in their language.

Reminders and Calendar

To set a location-based reminder, launch Siri and say, “Remind me to check my email when I get home.” Siri uses your phone’s GPS to alert you the next time you’re near the specified destination, so the reminder is triggered when you are there.

Various Siri commands make your calendar easier and faster to manage by adding or changing events and changing calendar defaults. You can use Siri commands to set or cancel a recurring calendar item or switch between daily and weekly views to view upcoming events in your life. Say, “How does my day look tomorrow?” You can invite another colleague to a planned meeting by asking Siri to send an invite to that person. Say, “Add Ken to my 11 a.m. meeting on Friday.”

Notes and Launch apps

With Siri handy, you don’t have to bother jotting down random notes. You just need to say them aloud and Siri will transcribe them in a note for you. To create elegant lists, you can say “new line” to separate each item. If you’re on iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra, you can sync Siri through iCloud so that your mobile notes will be waiting for you on your computer.

You know all the apps you have, but they’re not always conveniently located. When you have to quickly launch an app, ask Siri to find and launch it for you instead of hunting through all your folders. Siri can even figure out which app you want if you don’t use the correct name.

Time Management and Stocks Reports

There are only so many hours in a workday, and when you have to get things done quickly and in sequence, Siri is there to help you set time limits for each task. Say, “Set a timer for 45 minutes,” and the timer immediately begins counting down as you set to work.

Are you rolling in dough or taking a bath? Ask Siri to check the status of all stocks and exchanges and the status of your specific holdings. Siri can also serve up ancillary information like price-to-earning ratios, market caps and yields. Not only does Siri deliver information verbally, it offers a detailed graph of your stocks’ performance.

Weather and Navigation

Sure, you listened to the weather reports or even checked your weather app before throwing a flannel shirt into your backpack, but results will likely be more accurate with Siri. Not only can Siri speak weather conditions back to you, it can display a detailed forecast, including the daily high and low and chance of rain. You can also ask Siri about the forecast for the next week, or query for a specific day. Say, “What’s the forecast for Monday?” Siri can even tell you the approximate time of sunrise and sunset.

You no longer have to go cross-eyed trying to find directions to your next meeting on Google Maps. You no longer have to stress over maps at all, because Siri can access turn-by-turn directions to your destination. You can say, “Navigate to Elm Street,” and Siri automatically launches the navigation app. You can also get alternative directions if you hit unexpected traffic. You can also get transit or street directions if you’re not driving.

Get info

While searching with Google can get you the answer to almost any question, Siri can do a much faster and more accurate search for you, saving both time and taps and make suggestions based on your browsing habits. Siri has gotten smarter in iOS 11, thanks to new learning functionality and cross-device syncing.

Wrapping up!

Even if you never used Alexa and Siri in your private life, you’ll find voice-activated digital assistant a quick, easy way to help you manage your business, leaving you more time to concentrate on serving your customers and making your company a success. After a while, you may even find yourself using Alexa and Siri after you’ve gone home.