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Alexa for Business

aws.amazon.com

84 pointsres0nat0r69 comments

So now we're putting always-on amazon microphones everywhere in our companies too?

How exactly are companies going to be ok with private, trade-secret conversations? How about confidential meetings? How about Amazon competitors? How about employee law about potentially being eavesdropped on, all day?

The same way they're okay with all of their current audio and video conferencing equipment?

If we're going to hypothesize that any device with a camera or microphone can watch you at all times, why aren't people afraid of Cisco?

Plenty of people are probably afraid of their Cisco devices.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/cisco_shippin...

Most companies already use Skype for business/Slack/Hipchat for private conversations.

Maybe at startups, but most enterprises self-host things - including Skype for Business (formerly Lync).

If you mean companies smaller than 100 people, you might be right. Otherwise i know enough small companies != startups using skype and whatever was used at the beginning and/or someone was using before.

Amazon has a device that is always listening, that's true. It's listening for the trigger word.

If it did more than that, do you think companies deploying these devices wouldn't notice?

Outside of monitoring everything these devices store to flash and send across the the network, how would anybody notice? If an enterprising hacker gained control of these you may need to analyse side channels like ultrasonic messaging too.

"...send across the the network"

You know, major companies don't just plug ethernet cables to routers and forget about them.

They WILL notice the traffic.

No, we've always assumed that it's just waiting for the trigger word. But wasn't there that murder case where the police wanted recordings from the victim's Echo and they got them?

I don't remember the specifics.

Everyone here is absolutely right about "why are you complaining when you carry a phone" etc. Yes it's also risky. It's just such a bizarre normal we're in nowadays.

> But wasn't there that murder case where the police wanted recordings from the victim's Echo and they got them?

Well, strictly speaking, no, it was the suspect’s Echo. And the suspect agreed to allow Amazon to release them. But I can't find any indication that it involved any recordings except ones triggered by the wake word. See, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/30/us/amazon-echo-arkansas-murder...

Do you own one?

Echo has a history of requests. Songs that you play, apps you launch, basically all your requests. In my home I even have the requests to turn on/off devices. That info is sent to Amazon (obviously). And is available to you.

So there maybe some data that leaks that you wouldn't want to. For business this is important (meeting names can be confidential). Not sure how Amazon addresses these.

However, that's a bit different from always-on recording, which I doubt it does. I see no unusual activity in my home network, with 3 echos.

I actually did buy one (an Echo Dot) but I unplugged it after a day. I actually bought it to test out some custom apps I wanted to build.

Maybe eventually they will come out with an AVC, like a GVC but more betterer.

Isn't Siri and Google's 'Ok google' thing basically the same? Everyone in the room has that running all day everywhere they go.

I bring this up every time someone complains about devices like the Echo. Unless you ban cell phones, you must not be worried too much about having tons of always-on microphones around.

If you allow cellphones and don't use a noise generator like rabbler, your meeting isn't secretive enough

so do opsec like tony in the sopranos and leave all you mobiles out side the room

You mean, where someone can easily get to them to install a sniffer/ copy all content?

It's a thing that people have noise generators running while they have meetings? Isn't that annoying?

I was going to say that modern phones don't have the resources to perform recognition/recording outside of a trigger phrase without an obvious hit to battery life. But then there is the Pixel 2 which can identify a few thousand songs with little performance impact. All of the wired assistants don't even have this issue.

I use Sleep Cycle for my alarm clock, which uses the microphone to listen to your sleep and wake you up when it's a good time and you're ready for it. My bedside charging cable has been malfunctioning the past few days, so my phone has been running off the battery all night while doing this. Despite this, my battery only drops a small amount between when I turn the alarm on and when I wake up.

If the app was designed correctly it would probably only be listening within a ~1 hour window of when you want to wake up

That would be smart if it was just an alarm, but it also presents a full analysis of the entire night’s sleep, and notes and records any snoring it detects.

Alexa, would you mind signing this NDA?

Maybe this will lead to a modern equivalent to the Enigma machine ;)

I would imagine that most companies that are in the market for this have already decided to trust Amazon with most, if not all, of their most sensitive applications and data.

That image next to "Alexa helps you at your desk" is 17.5 MB as of now at at a resolution of 5720 x 3240. Pretty impressive to see an image loading line by line like back in the days.

It will be interesting to see what WeWork ends up using this for.

Jesus, it's the same size when I view the page on my smartphone. It doesn't even look as good as you'd think for 17.5 MB.

It would be nice if the Alexa team actually cared about people building business skills for the platform and treated them different than people submitting fart apps.

Disclaimer: I build business tools for voice with actual paid users. Looking to abandon Alexa for Google Assistant and Cortana. Apple, please do Siri right when you open it up properly.

I'm curious, what's the difference you're seeing between those three platforms for your use case?

The biggest is invocations – as more skills crowd the platform, getting Alexa to recognize our invocation is getting unusable.

Training for our specific pronunciation isn't available on Alexa. Our app is called Tali, pronounced "tally", and to get it to work now you have to say "Tay-lie". Whereas Google Actions can be trained with custom pronunciations.

I should also say that Dialogflow is magnificent.

Have you written up your experiences in a blog post or talk or something?

I'm on the same boat right now, was asked to build a POC in Amazon Lex, an Alexa Skill, Microsoft LUIS, Wit.ai and Dialogflow.

So far I've gotten to LUIS and Lex/Alexa, I'm glad to read Dialogflow is better :) (had high hopes for it)

You can add custom pronunciations on your amazon skills too

What kind of professions do you think get the most use out of your time tracker Tali?

Anyone who bills in small increments, has their hands busy, or is on the go.

Alexa, deploy project aardvark.

OK, deploying project aardvark, now on version 5

Alexa, roll back project aardvark.

OK, rolling back project arc, now on version 21.

Alexa, I said roll back aardvark!

OK. Rolling back project arc, now on version 20.

Alexa, stop everything!

I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.

You make it confirm the intent, and only then execute.

how about: Alexa, look up "X" in company wiki? or Alexa, what are the company holidays this month? or Alexa, submit an expense report for event "X" for "Y" dollars or Alexa, set Out of Office auto reply or ...

This is why no company has dared to choose HAL as the name for their digital voice assistant yet.

They're missing out. I would buy HAL as a system or a personality for any existing system.

having an assistant called EDI would be better

" I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees. "

HAL probably wouldn't work well as a trigger name: too short and not unique enough.

This is actually quite brilliant. Something that started off as a pure consumer in-home device makes total sense for conference rooms and hotels (as long as they know what they can ask it to do). Much better than trying to find remotes or switches.

Not sure about Alexa at our desk — it’ll have to do speaker separation and still it sounds quite annoying to everyone around.

> Not sure about Alexa at our desk — it’ll have to do speaker separation and still it sounds quite annoying to everyone around.

Yeah, noticed that the video didn't have any open offices in there!

It makes total sense until a human named Alexa joins your team.

There are humans named Siri too (it's a diminuitive of Sigrid) and, given the peculiar conventions of Thai nicknames, it's doubtless there's more than one human named Google.

You really can't win, short of being able to change your voice assistant's name (the humans won't change for a damn machine!).

You can change it to answer with “amazon.”

So with most companies employing an open floor plan isn't there a tremendous amount of audio overlap. Are all the devices linked and Alexa now smart enough to differentiate between multiple users?

What kind of work is really practical when done via voice vs secure authenticated terminal access? I talk to my co-workers to exchange ideas and come up with new ones. Talking to my computer or my office space seems awkward and aurally intrusive since people are trying to work and not hear you asking Alexa to, I don't know, make you a coffee?

I have Alexa at my desk right now in an open plan (I developed a demo skill for a POC), and it does disturb my coworkers.

It also isn't smart enough to differentiate between multiple users.

I suppose it's not for offices where people are sitting next to keyboards anyway.

* A conference room (no remote controls in sight): "Alexa, turn on the projector".

* A hotel room (from a coach): "Alexa, turn the air conditioning off."

* A workshop (everybody's hands are busy and greasy): "Alexa, mark order 2348 completed, bill ten dollars extra for urgency."

This makes certain sense.

I couldn't find it, but I wonder if there is any way that you can ask it ONLY to run the skills which have been deployed/approved by the company. Can think of plenty of use-cases where I work, but I know it'd be a non-starter if it could, just like at home, be used to order products,tell jokes, play jeopardy, etc.

The sign up flow is confusing. I clicked the button, but was sent to AWS. Finally signed in there, and was taken to a support level sign-up flow. Went back to the original link whilst logged in, and kept getting redirected to AWS when I clicked the button.

Could be helpful at work: "Alexa, open the pod bay doors"

I tried. She replies in a pissy voice that she's not HAL9000 :-)

Alexa for Business lets you build your own private custom skills for your workplace, your employees, or your customers to use. You can make these skills available only to your shared Alexa devices, and your enrolled users. Alexa for Business provides an additional set of APIs that provide information about device location, which lets you add context to your skills.

This is huge! This is the corner we needed to turn to be able to make really useful skills for the enterprise.

I'm pumped for this!

I'm half interested in what capabilities Alexa for Business offers you, and half suspicious that this is sarcasm.

Brings to mind Will.i.am's startups pivot to enterprise voice controls[0] which they call Omega [1]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/06/will-i-ams-start-up-i-am-rai...

[1]https://iamplus.com/enterprise/

My clients would stop doing business with me if I had these in my office, and I wouldn't blame them.

Is noone afraid of the vendor locki-in with these always-on listening devices these days?

What's the revenue model for Alexa? I see all these companies designing Alexa integration into their IoT farting widget, often for uses that don't involve buying stuff from Amazon. Do manufacturers pay a license fee or something?

Seems like catch up to what Google has available through the assistant APIs.

Putting the privacy aspect aside, this is gonna be hilarious with people "abusing" Alexa for jokes etc. As far as I now, Alexa can't be restricted to the voice of a single/some people.

except that it does https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/11/16460120/...

wow. That's not easy stuff

Sounds useful, but so scary from privacy point of view.

All of your sounds can be recorded by hacker, even if you decide not to buy Alexa you still may ended up in staying in hotel with Alexa for business. reply

You can already be recorded by a hacker. Your phone can be hacked, it's always on you. In a meeting room, the phone of any individual is enough. The conference computer can be hacked. Any individuals laptop can be hacked.

This is just one more item in an already long list. It's not particularly special.

Increasing your attack surface is never a good idea, even when you're already potentially at risk.

The anthem of our future dystopia will be the annoying music that plays in every Google/Amazon/Facebook product showcase.

The only unanswered question is how many of them are needed per square meter.

p.s. first hand impression: one per small or medium room.

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