Alexa For Business

Alexa for Business is a managed service which consists of three main components: a set of management tools, APIs to integrate with existing IT applications and infrastructure, and the Echo devices themselves.

Unnati Vadgama
Alexa Developers SRM
4 min readSep 30, 2020

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It is distributed by Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services(AWS). Alexa for Business service allows institutions and their employees to use Alexa to accomplish their work easily. Using this service, employees can use Alexa as their smart assistant to escalate their productivity by being helpful in meeting rooms as well as at their desks. Information Technology managers and facilities administrators can also use Alexa for Business to estimate and increase the utilization of existing meeting rooms in their workplace.

Improved meeting room experience, increase in meeting room utilization, voice enabled applications, enhancement in employee productivity, these are the benefits for using Alexa for Business.

How it works

Alexa can be used as a personal assistant for discrete productivity task and as a shared device that multiple users can interact with-in locations such as conference rooms and corridors. Alexa for Business collects information about the devices, user accounts of employees, and skills in your institution. Alexa uses this information to perform tasks when asked. Just say, “Alexa, start the meeting” in the conference room and all of those things open up — saving people minutes at the beginning of many meetings that are wasted today. For this, Alexa uses the location of the device, calendar information for the room, and type of video conferencing equipment available, which is stored in your Alexa for Business account. There are other smart office applications too. Staff could ask for directions around office spaces for locating meeting rooms, report a tech issue or order new equipment supplies.

Alexa for Business features

  1. Meeting room experience

Meeting rooms can be upgraded with an Alexa-enabled devices and can be used to control video conferencing and in-room systems. Alexa for Business integrates with your Office365, Google G Suite, or Microsoft Exchange calendar to look up your scheduled meeting, and can automatically join meetings from popular UC platforms, including Amazon Chime, Skype for Business, and Zoom.

For joining the meeting, simply say “Alexa, start the meeting”. No more trifling with conferencing equipment, remotes, and calendars. Alexa can keep meetings on time by reminding the user when their reservation is almost over. The timing and behaviour of the reminder can be configured, Alexa can play sound, or speak up and say “time check”. When an employee joins a meeting using Alexa, and the meeting room is free, Alexa automatically books the room for them.

2. Meeting room utilization

Alexa for Business now provides meeting room utilization criterion such as total number of meetings, most and least used meeting rooms, reservation attendance rate, and meeting rooms hours freed up by Alexa. Alexa will release the invite on a room’s calendar if no one checks into their meeting reservation. Employees will be checked in automatically if they use Alexa to start their meeting. Alexa for Business will surface to administrators what their most and least booked rooms are. With intelligent room release enabled, Alexa for Business will also provide data on room attendance rates, and how many times a room was booked.

3. Employee productivity

Using Alexa for Business, employees can use Alexa as their personal device for doing work at their desks as well as in their homes too. Admins can also invite users to join their Alexa for Business account using Alexa for Business enrolment portal. Once they’ve enrolled, you can make private skills available to them. Alexa can be used to automatically search meetings and join it. A one-click dial-in number, meeting ID, and PIN are required in the meeting invite. Also, you can stay up-to-date with your work and personal calendar by asking “Alexa, what is my next event?” or “Alexa, what’s on my calendar?”. Alexa informs you about your next events, and allows you to move, schedule, or cancel them. You can also interact with your email by saying “Alexa, read my emails.” Alexa will be able to read your emails and allow you to reply, flag, delete, archive or mark them as unread. This service is also useful for getting work-related updates like upcoming or unanswered meeting invitations and remainders for the day. This increases the productivity of employees up to greater extent.

4. Administration and Management

Alexa for Business lets you manage your devices, users and skills using the Alexa for Business console. Administrators can use Alexa for Business to estimate and increase the utilization of existing meeting rooms in their workplace. The administrator can manage shared devices, enable access to your corporate calendar, manage skills, configure conference rooms, manage user enrolment, delete voice and response history via API, or enable or disable voice recording reviews. Amazon Alexa for business is really assisting the business owners to become more productive and efficient with its best in class features packed device.

To engage in other amazing Alexa-related challenges and facts, drop in at our official website alexadevsrm.com .

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