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Alexa for Business
- jakozaur 9y agoSounds 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
- tensor 9y agoYou 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.
- 659087 9y agoIncreasing your attack surface is never a good idea, even when you're already potentially at risk.
- atonse 9y agoSo 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?
- Bhilai 9y agoMost companies already use Skype for business/Slack/Hipchat for private conversations.
- rightos 9y agoMaybe at startups, but most enterprises self-host things - including Skype for Business (formerly Lync).
- sigi45 9y agoIf 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.
- andrewguenther 9y agoThe 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?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 9y agoPlenty of people are probably afraid of their Cisco devices. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/cisco_shipping_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/cisco_shippin...
- outworlder 9y agoAmazon 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?
- raisedbyninjas 9y agoOutside 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.
- outworlder 9y ago"...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.
- atonse 9y agoNo, 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.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> 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-case-dismissed/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/30/us/amazon-echo-arkansas-murder...
- outworlder 9y ago
- mc32 9y agoMaybe eventually they will come out with an AVC, like a GVC but more betterer.
- burger_moon 9y agoIsn't Siri and Google's 'Ok google' thing basically the same? Everyone in the room has that running all day everywhere they go.
- mikeash 9y agoI 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.
- Spooks 9y agoIf you allow cellphones and don't use a noise generator like rabbler, your meeting isn't secretive enough
- lostboys67 9y agoso do opsec like tony in the sopranos and leave all you mobiles out side the room
- jagermo 9y agoYou mean, where someone can easily get to them to install a sniffer/ copy all content?
- elicash 9y agoIt's a thing that people have noise generators running while they have meetings? Isn't that annoying?
- raisedbyninjas 9y agoI 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.
- cJ0th 9y agoAlexa, would you mind signing this NDA?
- jrs95 9y agoMaybe this will lead to a modern equivalent to the Enigma machine ;)
- InvisibleCities 9y agoI 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.
- flgr 9y agoThat 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.
- dEnigma 9y agoJesus, 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.
- azinman2 9y agoThis 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.
- another-dave 9y ago> 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!
- bitwize 9y agoIt 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!).
- azinman2 9y agoYou can change it to answer with “amazon.”
- falcolas 9y agoAlexa, 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.
- outworlder 9y agoYou make it confirm the intent, and only then execute.
- coolanymous 9y agohow 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 ...
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThis is why no company has dared to choose HAL as the name for their digital voice assistant yet.
- RegBarclay 9y agoThey're missing out. I would buy HAL as a system or a personality for any existing system.
- lostboys67 9y agohaving an assistant called EDI would be better " I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees. "
- ghaff 9y agoHAL probably wouldn't work well as a trigger name: too short and not unique enough.
- therealmarv 9y agoCould be helpful at work: "Alexa, open the pod bay doors"
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoI tried. She replies in a pissy voice that she's not HAL9000 :-)
- funkythingss 9y agoPutting 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.
- coolanymous 9y agoexcept that it does https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/11/16460120/amazon-echo-multi-user-voice-new-feature https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/11/16460120/...
- funkythingss 9y agowow. That's not easy stuff
- iloveluce 9y agoBrings 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-raises-117-million-in-enterprise-pivot.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/06/will-i-ams-start-up-i-am-rai... [1]https://iamplus.com/enterprise/ https://iamplus.com/enterprise/
- jayd16 9y agoSeems like catch up to what Google has available through the assistant APIs.
- Negative1 9y agoSo 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?
- GFischer 9y agoI 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.
- nine_k 9y agoI 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.
- nhangen 9y agoThe 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.
- nrclark 9y agoWhat'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?
- matthoiland 9y agoIt 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.
- euyyn 9y agoI'm curious, what's the difference you're seeing between those three platforms for your use case?
- matthoiland 9y agoThe 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.
- GFischer 9y agoHave 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)
- jasonmaydie 9y agoYou can add custom pronunciations on your amazon skills too
- RepressedEmu 9y agoWhat kind of professions do you think get the most use out of your time tracker Tali?
- ChicagoBoy11 9y agoI 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.
- hallman76 9y agoAlexa 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!
- bllguo 9y agoI'm half interested in what capabilities Alexa for Business offers you, and half suspicious that this is sarcasm.
- gallerdude 9y agoThe anthem of our future dystopia will be the annoying music that plays in every Google/Amazon/Facebook product showcase.
- rdslw 9y agoThe only unanswered question is how many of them are needed per square meter. p.s. first hand impression: one per small or medium room.
- chinathrow 9y agoIs noone afraid of the vendor locki-in with these always-on listening devices these days?
- 659087 9y agoMy clients would stop doing business with me if I had these in my office, and I wouldn't blame them.