Poly Announces Amazon Chime and Alexa for Business Integration For the Trio Conference Phone
Image Credit: Poly
Earlier this week, Poly, also known as Plantronics, Inc., announced the integration of Amazon Chime and Alexa for Business solutions with the Trio conference phone. The new AWS solutions will enable the Trio phone to be controlled with voice commands to manage meetings and activate third-party devices. Poly also announced yesterday that the Voyager 4200 UC headsets will feature Alexa built-in, in order to help workers be more productive. The integration of Amazon Chime and Alexa for Business with Trio is expected to available globally to Plantronics and AWS users in April 2019. The integration of Amazon Alexa into Voyager 4200 UC headsets is expected to roll out this spring as well. Cary Bran, senior vice president, and chief strategy officer of Poly commented on the integration saying,
By leveraging Amazon Web Services, we can continue to offer crisp visuals and clear audio across multiple business ecosystems and devices so that our users can focus on communication – not the technology. We’re eager to bring Poly devices to a wider customer set while sharing new features with existing users.
Poly is a global communications company, and Amazon Chime is a communications service that allows users to meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside an organization. Alexa for Business is a service that enables organizations to use Alexa to reserve meeting rooms, start conference calls, manage schedules, keep track of to-do lists, and set reminders with voice commands.
Image Credit: Poly
Trio and Voyager Alexa Capabilities
With Amazon Alexa on Trio, users will be able to access all Alexa for Business skills in order to start and end meetings, as well as book rooms. Users will also be able to build private skills for their own meeting environments. Alexa already has integrated with third-party applications like Skype for Business, Zoom, BlueJeans, and Cisco WebEx. These integrations will also be available to Trio users. Alexa for Business calendars and Amazon Chime meetings will sync with and display meeting schedules on Trio.
The Voyager 4200 UC Alexa integration will enable users to tap-and-ask Alexa queries. The headset will also integrate Poly’s SaaS subscription, called Plantronics Manager Pro. It allows IT professionals to either choose to enable or disable users’ ability to register their headsets with Amazon Alexa.
Voice Assistants in the Office a Growing Use Case
The inclusion of voice assistants in the office is a use case that has been around for some time, and several major players have some option for enterprise use. Microsoft even announced last year that it would focus Cortana on enterprise use rather than being a general consumer voice assistant. The company also released a Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise in the Fall of 2018.
Last spring, a survey of 500 IT professionals in the U.S. and Europe conducted by Spiceworks found that Cortana and Siri are among the most popular voice assistants in enterprises. The survey found that Cortana and Siri are used today by 49% and 47% of enterprises respectively. Large enterprises were found to be leading voice assistant adoption with 24% of large enterprises using them at the time the survey was conducted.
Last month, CogitAI lanched a reinforcement learning solution, called Continua, in order to accelerate AI use in enterprises. Voicea recently added new features, like teams and channels to its meeting transcription and note-taking voice assistant for enterprises, called Eva. Even will.i.am has dedicated his Omega voice assistant to enterprise users. Voice assistant use in offices is a growing use case, and the integration of Alexa in the Trio phone and Voyager headset from Poly are just the latest examples.
