Alexa Skills
Families and businesses alike have started using virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to improve their lives and their productivity. In response, Amazon has created more options for Alexa users to integrate into their daily lives. One such development is Alexa Skills or third-party apps that enhance the function of the virtual assistant.
In times of a pandemic like COVID-19, offices forced to close for the safety of their employees are all working from home. Virtual offices for some are a new adjustment. But these adjustments may not be temporary as businesses find that home offices are more cost-effective than office space for all employees.
In a survey from 451 Research, 67 percent of respondents said that the transition from in-office to home would be permanent. 20 percent said they would outfit their employees with alternate home office equipment. When everyone is working from home, the same tools that would be available to them in the office must be substituted.
There are more than 100,000 voice apps on the market that can be used as Alexa skills. These apps can be used to create, design, manage, or just as a helping tool for whatever task your team is working on. You and your company can even create your own private skills for internal use through the medium. Alexa for Business allows companies to access the information they need across the network of employees.
How Do I Use or Make an Alexa Skill?
The Alexa app allows users to open the menu and choose skills from the many listed. If you know the name of the skill you’re looking for, just say it into Alexa. However, not everyone knows exactly what they’re looking for or even what they need in an Alexa skill. If your company is trying this out for the first time, it may be worthwhile to write down expectations and needs and then look for something that matches.
Existing third-party apps that your company already uses can be integrated into the Alexa system. But if you’re just trying this out, it may be time to create an app–or several apps–that fit into your daily routines. Your needs may include conferences and conference communication, briefings for employees on a daily or weekly basis, or accessing crucial information when an employee is working on a project.
What other businesses does your company work with? Maybe it’s time to create a skill that can apply to your employees when they are working with a corporate partner. Other companies have their own apps to use for business-to-business partnerships and strategies. If your company works with stocks, for example, there are different Alexa skills that deal with trading, buying, and selling stocks from reputable companies.
An Alexa Skills Kit allows users to create their own skills. These skills can help enhance the virtual office experience and give back hours of valuable work time to your business. The sky’s the limit when it comes to building a skill!
Then there is designing the voice user interface. Voicify, a leading integration software, works to extend “voicification” to operations and processes. Integrate tools and programs into your platform or skill using Voicify. When building an Alexa skill, the designer must ensure that there are ways to allow users to interact with the skill through voice.
Intents, or requests, are also key to this process. Using sample utterances, or phrases commonly used by your employees, a designer can route a map to these intents. Through creating a dialog model, your skill has the ability to give access to the information Alexa will need to converse with a user.
Statistics About Alexa Skills
Virtual assistants are becoming more and more common in everyday life, whether at home or in the office. 66.4 million virtual assistants are owned throughout the United States. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, their numbers are steadily growing. Now that employees work from home more frequently, a virtual assistant can bring them the information they need.
Businesses collectively tend to spend $4 trillion a year on technology and updates. In a year where technology and virtual office space dictate how we run our businesses, it may be time to make sure that these purchases are up to date with the demands of COVID-19.
Alexa is by far the dominant player in the world of virtual assistants. Reports in 2019 found that Amazon sold 100 million Alexa devices. And the numbers continue to rise.
How Voicify Can Help
Voicify’s Conversation Experience Platform lets departments and individuals alike use Alexa skills as needed without the need for technological training. Write, implement, and manage new skills for your office or business.
Voicify works as the sole platform in choosing, building, and processing your voice experience on the device of your choosing. The technology functions as a single system for users, allowing them to find the content they need in the medium they choose, in a similar fashion to the number of browsers one can use to find the same information online. Voicify helps businesses simplify the various processes needed to manage thousands of devices as offices seek to integrate virtual assistants into their work lives.
Placing your content into Voicify allows your company to:
- Connect Alexa and Voicify in order to condense the conversational experience into one process.
- Make modernization and virtual offices easy to adjust to through the conversational experience.
- Provide the right content in the right frame for the device employees prefer to use.
The content does not need to be exclusive to Voicify in order to aid your transition to a modernized approach. Voicify takes contextual cues from whoever the device’s user is and allows the response to be framed for the device itself.
