Voice First Technology Set to Reshape Workplaces

Voice-first technology has evolved over these past two years, especially with integrating and automating voice technology to pop-in platforms to make people more productive.

With more and more people opting to work from home, business owners are now making the most of voice recognition technology in the workspace. Let’s look at how voice technology is reshaping today’s workspaces.

“Alexa, Give an applause!!”

Yes, today we are discussing the most distinguished, yet the closest technology to human emotions – the Voice technology and voice based digital assistants.

Some popular voice assistants are Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google. Let us not dig into the comparison of them with each other, as this article is more about how the voice first technology is reshaping the lives of humans.

Where are we now with Voice Tech?

All are aware of the COVID-19 pandemic and confused how the reopening of the offices in the midst of this would affect their own lives. On the other side, sitting at home is not even favoring the both, businesses and employees, on the longer run. Work from home does not even guarantee immunity from getting infected as there could be a number of other reasons.

However, one thing is assured that voice first technology along with the contact less interfaces could be the answer to most of our questions for a safe workplace. It is not a new technology and not an obsolete one too. The interest and applications based on the smart speakers has been remarkable over the past two years. This is an encouragement for the businesses to make the most of voice-enabled workplace technology trends.

The best possible thing the voice engineers and innovators have done to the voice technology is the integration with other technologies, automations, and of course the internet to foster the voice search. The businesses are now pairing the work with voice first technology to pop-in a platform which the employees can use to become more engaged, productive, richful with information day in, day out.

Voice space is important for employees and following are the reasons to understand why it is important to keep an eye over it.

• Big shift in employee’s individual as well as collective productivity
• Scalable and seamless voice search, analysis, and actions
• Custom voice skills development for a range of business needs and patterns

Top Trends in the Voice-enabled Workplaces

Let us consider Alexa for business, a service by Amazon, helping businesses to make the most via voice assistant Alexa.

Be it an enterprise, a small or medium scale company, Amazon is aiming to make voice assistant Alexa a key, to transform your company to become a voice-enabled company. Seamless integration of Alexa Skill with mobile applications and other technologies to unlock new spectrum of possibilities for the company and its employees. Alexa already has the potential to be an inevitable accessory at the workplace- to order stationery, book conference and event venues, and launch meetups or meetings.

The Chief Announcement Maker

In case of delivering important alerts to the team due to a rough weather, traffic updates, and all the emergency or vital happenings around the city, Alexa can help employees to get updated for making required actions. Moreover, mails have become less effective to make such announcements as they deal with hundreds of them everyday. One more mail to notify on any of these alerts or internal announcements is not ideal.

• Information sharing interface
• Helps in receiving feedback from employees
• Make internal official announcements on-the-go
• Innovative way for updates that is far from boring mails
• Assists employees to plan their routine at workplace
• Alerts the workforce sooner through a mobile app integration

Effective Resource Management

Ask Alexa to open any employee’s individual documents without breaking your current workflow. Alexa skills can be custom developed and integrated with a number of monitoring tasks and operations based on various business needs. Alexa can retrive data to provide real-time information whenever required.

• Access resource data to manage their tasks
• Make notes on-the-go
• Streamline billable hours for your clients for any project
• Set reminders
• Real-time project updates and management
• Block facebook and social media platforms for certain duration
• Enhance productivity and planning

Smarter Work Floor

The employees can use personal devices powered by Alexa at work and home to be more organised and productive. Voice-enabled smart speakers could be your best companions as they help you check and manage your calendar to come up with to-do lists as well as reminders for certain actions or meetups. They could be your intelligent personal assistants.

Shared devices can be used in the common areas for anyone to be used to have information or assistance for certain business applications. For example, voice technology could be integrated with room scheduling softwares. Once done, employees can try and find an available conference or meeting rooms with the help of digital voice assistants or smart speakers. Just say ‘Alexa, find me a meeting room’ and it will find the room that fits your meeting needs.

Personal Devices:

• Your Intelligent personal assistant
• Enable / Disable calling and messaging
• Auto-dial conference call number from anywhere
• Join meetings on-the-go
• Schedule meetings, meetups, and set reminders

Shared devices:

• Join conference calls and meetings instantly
• Read important facts and figures aloud during meetings
• Help people to navigate around the office
• Find a vacant meeting room
• Play music and reads latest announcements
• Complaint bookings and forwarding
• Helps in procurement and management operations

Voice & IoT Led Enhanced Office IT & Operations

We all know the potential of IoT solutions and applications when it comes to automation. Connecting the power of voice to already IoT enabled offices could be the next intelligent step, a drooling one indeed. Voice technology could help offices to manage its power resources in terms of light and heating appliances. Employees can easily turn on and turn off lights simply by giving a command to the voice assistant.

The IT team and managers also can roll out various operations by using voice technology based on custom voice skill development and integration with the existing systems.

• Voice skills integration to manage operational IoT solutions
• Employees submit IT help requests easily for quicker resolution
• Easy employee on-boarding process
• Helps in troubleshooting systems
• IT team can roll out updates for Software/hardware devices
• Maintenance / Downtime updates and reminders

Voice is Power, Voice is Future

Amazon is the one that has inspired and encouraged users to make the use of such voice-based digital assistants to be used in the workspace, through its Alexa for Business service. Otherwise voice technology was merely a home-based personalised entertainment experience for most of us in the start. Alexa for business fostered technology integrations with use of voice commands which open tons and tons of new possibilities to various industries, business operations, and even lifestyle too.

Stats are Encouraging Too…

• 2.2 billion digital assistants were sold in 2017.
• 3.6 billion are expected to be sold in 2022.
• 100,000+ Alexa skills developed and available beyond 2019
• Businesses see a boost around 53% by using the Alexa capabilities

If you want to make a step forward and make it count in real terms, then give Voice First technology a good thought to develop custom voice skills based upon your business needs.

IndiaNIC, an award winning software development company since 1997, boasts experts which could guide you thoroughly in your journey to develop and implement voice oriented digital assistants for your professional and personalised experiences.

Contact the right team of experts for more on Voice powered workplace solutions.

Conclusion

Voice-first technology has seen a jump in these recent COVID-19 times, especially in the workplace. With digital assistants being commonly used and the latest updates, such as Alexa for Businesses service, it has become more than a personalized entertainment unit.

With the latest trends and upcoming changes in the workplace, it is a good time to build your voice technology based on business needs rather than miss out on the trend.

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