10 Best Amazon Alexa for Business Skills to Bring to Your Office

Amazon’s Echo devices are extremely popular due in part to Alexa, Amazon’s virtual personal assistant and the answer to several alternatives, including Apple’s Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby. Amazon hopes to make the personal assistant even more popular in corporate offices with the introduction on Nov. 29 of Alexa for Business, a set of skills that are most useful in the office. These skill help business users update their schedules, track their marketing efforts, make or update their business expense reports. This slide show will cover some of the skill that will help business users get the most from Alexa for Business.

A popular Amazon Alexa skill, Any.do is designed for those who want to create and track to-do lists and events on calendars. From a device like the Amazon Echo, users can ask that Alexa add items to a to-do list or shopping list, and the virtual personal assistant will do it. Tasks can be synchronized with Any.do accounts on a variety of other devices, including smartphones, desktops, and tablets.

With the Expedia skill available with Amazon’s Alexa, users can keep track of their travel itineraries. With this skill users can ask Alexa to do everything from check flight status to book a rental car. Expedia is currently working on adding the ability to book hotels and flights from Alexa.

Designed for corporate users who have Cisco unified communications products in their offices, Alexa for Cisco TelePresence lets users control their Cisco platforms from the Echo. The skill can be used to join a meeting while hosts can order Alexa to either start or end a meeting on the fly.

Quick Events is a handy skill for Amazon’s Alexa. The app works with Google Calendar and lets users ask Alexa to add items to a calendar and schedule events with sophisticated queries such as, “tell Quick Events to add lunch meeting on Wednesday.” Alexa will add those events to a Google Calendar by using the Quick Events skill.

Chat Bot for Slack was not actually created by Slack and the company does not support it. However, the chat bot is integrates with Slack. Users can link their Slack accounts to the chat bot and immediately post to channels using a voice message. To do so, users need to say which channel they want to post to and say their message. Alexa takes it from there.

With help from Web Analytics, companies that are using Google Analytics for their websites can keep track of web site traffic. The skill allows users to ask Alexa for a Web Analytics report, followed by a timeframe. Alexa will then return visitor traffic information after retrieving it from Google Analytics.

BMC Software provides a number of enterprise applications for performance management, data center automation and IT service management. It also helps enterprises to identify and resolve regulatory compliance issues. Now there IT managers can ask Alexa to open BMC Software and find out the compliance status of a number of a number of IT management issues.  The app focuses on cloud and DevOps resources.

Corporate users that are also Wunderlist users should find some value in Task Master. The skill integrates with Wunderlist and allows users to quickly find out what they need to do throughout the day. The skill can also be used to add tasks to a Wunderlist. However note that Microsoft, which acquired Wunderlist in June 2015, announced in April 2017 that it is planning to discontinue Wunderlist in favor of To Do, a new task manager integrated with Office 365.

For transportation companies that use Rhino Fleet Tracking, the skill of the same name could come in handy. The app requires users to sign in to their Rhino accounts to they can ask Alexa to find out where fleet vehicles are. The app can also be used to assign drivers to vehicles and track individual drivers.

Welto is a financial advice app that could be useful for small business owners. From within the app, users can track their corporate income and expenses and find out when a bill is due to ensure they don’t incur late charges.