Bringing Alexa into the workplace! From the announcement: Alexa for Business brings the Alexa you know and love into the workplace to help all types of workers to be more productive and organized on both personal and shared Echo devices. In the workplace, shared devices can be placed in common areas for anyone to use, and workers can use their personal devices to connect at work and at home. End users can use shared devices or personal devices. Here’s what they can do from each. Shared devices Join meetings in conference rooms: You can simply say “Alexa, start the meeting”. Alexa turns on the video conferencing equipment, dials into your conference call, and gets the meeting going. Help around the office: access custom skills to help with directions around the office, finding an open conference room, reporting a building equipment problem, or ordering new supplies. Personal devices Enable calling and messaging: Alexa helps make phone calls, hands free and can also send messages on your behalf. Automatically dial into conference calls: Alexa can join any meeting with a conference call number via voice from home, work, or on the go. Intelligent assistant: Alexa can quickly check calendars, help schedule meetings, manage to-do lists, and set reminders. Find information: Alexa can help find information in popular business applications like Salesforce, Concur, or Splunk. Here are some of the controls available to administrators: Provision & Manage Shared Alexa Devices: You can provision and manage shared devices around your workplace using the Alexa for Business console. For each device you can set a location, such as a conference room designation, and assign public and private skills for the device. Configure Conference Room Settings: Kick off your meetings with a simple “Alexa, start the meeting.” Alexa for Business allows you to configure your conference room settings so you can use Alexa to start your meetings and control your conference room equipment, or dial in directly from the Amazon Echo device in the room. Manage Users: You can invite users in your organization to enroll their personal Alexa account with your Alexa for Business account. Once your users have enrolled, you can enable your custom private skills for them to use on any of the devices in their personal Alexa account, at work or at home. Manage Skills: You can assign public skills and custom private skills your organization has created to your shared devices, and make private skills available to your enrolled users. You can create skills groups, which you can then assign to specific shared devices. Build Private Skills & Use Alexa for Business APIs: Dig into the Alexa Skills Kit and build your own skills. Then you can make these available to the shared devices and enrolled users in your Alexa for Business account, all without having to publish them in the public Alexa Skills Store. Alexa for Business offers additional APIs, which you can use to add context to your skills and automate administrative tasks.

finally we can automate the swear jar concept

And this could be very useful in addition with the product we launched today ^^ https://www.producthunt.com/post...

This will be huge. Especially with a developer platform.

Game changer. First to market with a smart office tool that you don't need to train employees on. No software to learn. Just talk to the hockey puck on your desk or wall. User adoption will be easy.

This could be massive especially with a well documented dev platform. I wonder how it will actually be used in a work environment though. Talking to an AI in natural language is still pretty foreign for an average user. That said, I think its getting better.

Been waiting for Amazon to start introducing the concept of using Alexa in the workplace.

This is game changer. Time to integrate apps with Alexa!

:) narrator sounds like Steve Jobs?

I think this is where Alexa was really created to live in. Not -like a creepy cousin- inside my house..

First time I bought it was surprised by the monotony. Thanks