Alexa for Business at Enterprise Connect

No matter where you work, you probably spend much of your office time in meetings. While an integral part of our work lives, there are a number of obstacles that can get in the way of an efficient meeting, like finding a room, wrestling with cumbersome hardware, and looking up the conference ID while dialing into the call. We launched Alexa for Business to simplify your meeting experience by enabling you to use your voice to complete those tasks.

Our customers have asked for more ways to access and use Alexa for Business, so we are excited to announce an expansion of meeting room integrations with Poly, Joan, and Robin. Each of these companies already offer solutions dedicated to simplifying customers’ meeting experiences in the office. And now, their solutions are Alexa-enabled.

Poly Trio

Next month, Poly will be launching the integration of Alexa into their Poly Trio in general availability. Enabling Alexa for Business on your Trio will be as simple as installing the latest firmware and registering your device with the Poly cloud. Once enabled, you can call contacts and phone numbers, join and leave meetings, and reserve rooms by simply asking Alexa. You can also access the private skills you have built from the Trio, such as reporting a service issue or getting the latest company news. To learn more about the Poly Trio, read about it on the Poly website.

“Poly is on a mission to build bridges with the leading companies in voice, video cloud technology and beyond,” said Laura Marx, Vice President Global Alliance and Partner Marketing at Poly. “By leveraging Amazon Web Services, we can continue to offer crisp visuals and clear audio across multiple business ecosystems and devices so that our users can focus on communication – not the technology. We’re eager to bring Poly devices to a wider customer set while sharing new features with existing users.”

Room Booking with Joan and Robin

Starting today, both Joan and Robin customers can enable their respective skills from the Alexa Skills Store. With these skills, users can ask Alexa to find available rooms (“Alexa, find a room at noon”), ask who owns the reservation (“Alexa, who booked this room?”), and book the room they’re in (“Alexa, book this room for half an hour”). Alexa will communicate with the customer’s Joan or Robin service, fulfill the user’s request, and sync the room’s calendar.

“Our aim at Robin is to help people interact with their office space in frictionless ways,” said Zach Dunn, Co-founder and CPO at Robin, “with the Robin skill, our customers now have an intuitive and hands-free way to find and reserve a meeting room by just asking Alexa.” To find out more about the Robin skill, read their blog post.

“We see the Joan and Alexa collaboration as a perfect match for our customers,” said Matej Zalar, Co-Founder and CEO of Visionect, Inc., the company developing the Joan meeting room solution, “with Joan boards on the outside of meeting rooms, and Alexa on the inside of meeting rooms, we deliver a delightful room booking experience for employees in the office.” To find out more about the Joan skill, read their blog post.