How does Amazon’s new Alexa for Business service fit with the recent Microsoft-Amazon partnership around voice assistants?
On November 30, Amazon announced that Alexa is heading straight into Microsoft’s productivity wheelhouse with the new Alexa for Busines service.
A quick look at the already-available Alexa for Business skills — dialing into conference calls, controlling conference room settings, provisioning and managing individual and shared Echo devices — makes it clear that Amazon isn’t content to keep Alexa primarily inside the home/consumer space.
If you’re Microsoft, you have to be worried. I can’t help but wonder about how much of the Alexa for Business plan Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was privy when he signed that Alexa-Cortana partnership deal this summer.
In August, this was Amazon’s positioning of why it partnered with Microsoft for Cortana:
After today’s announcement, I’m not sure why anyone using Alexa would need or want to ask Cortana to book a meeting or check a work calendar. As Amazon announced, Alexa for Business will integrate with Office 365 and support on-premises Exchange — just like Cortana.
It’s no secret Microsoft is lagging far behind Alexa with its Cortana developer story. It’s also no secret that Microsoft has plans to try to integrate Cortana more deeply into the conference room, as it hinted in a „Microsoft Future“ podcast earlier this year.
In an episode of that podcast, Microsoft officials describe a conference room where Cortana greets meeting participants, assists them in joining a scheduled meeting, transcribe meeting notes, recommend documents and reminding people of the names and titles of meeting participants.
Microsoft seems to be moving away from its original direction with Cortana (making it a friendlier front end for Bing) and toward making it a true digital personal assistant that is deeply integrated into apps that users already have, like Office, Skype and Teams. But Amazon seems to be moving this way, too.
I’ve asked Microsoft officials for their take on Alexa for Business. No word back yet.
If Microsoft is planning on making the „modern office“ the place where Cortana shines brightest, they better hurry. Amazon and Google aren’t going to wait.
