Explain some new Alexa Skillsets you would roll out and why.

Alexa today already has thousands of skillsets. I think it’s a testament to Amazon’s ability to attract and provide streamlined tools for 3rd party developers to build for and integrate with the voice enable apps ecosystem.

Alexa, at the heart of its electronic products, has enabled Amazon to remain a dominant e-commerce player, and increase its value to businesses with Alexa for business, but also minimize its weakness in the mobile landscape, since it doesn’t have a massively adopted OS to the level of iOS or Android.

I’d like to focus this conversation on Alexa’s skillsets as they pertain to Amazon’s electronic devices. The goal of these new skillsets then, would be to increase sales of Amazon’s devices by making them more attractive, and to increase retention of existing owners.

Now, I’d liked to identify the different types of users that could interface with these new skillsets. I’m assuming all of the electronic devices (echo, dot etc) will use these skillsets.

1) Alexa for business
-Businesses want to increase their productivity, reduce costs, and operate as efficiently as possible.
-Businesses can range in size from 10+ people to thousands of employees
-Some of their main use cases include managing meetings, facilitating stand ups, aiding in company wide presentations, product demos, helping employees collaborate

2) Alexa for consumers
Consumers want to make their lives easier, control their IOT devices.
Consumers might interact with Alexa in their bathrooms, living rooms, kitchens or garages.
A consumer may be in the bathroom and realize they’ve run out of toilet paper and need to find out when their order for more is coming in.

I’d like to focus on businesses as the main customer for these new skillsets because it’d help grow mindshare for Amazon for businesses and it’s interesting to me.

I think out of all the business use cases I mentioned above, the need around meeting management has the highest impact and is applicable to almost every business. So I’ll focus on that use case specifically for these new skillsets.

Here are some new skillsets solutions for helping business manage a meeting.

1) Meeting facilitation
‘Alexa, start meeting’
‘Alexa, next meeting item’
‘You have 15 minutes left in your meeting’
‘Alexa, can we stay in this room after our meeting is over?’
‘Alexa, end meeting’

2) Smart meeting notes that are only record based on the type of action word mentioned during the meeting.
‘Alexa, take meeting notes’

3) Quickly grab information from someone not in the meeting
‘Alexa, ask Tom if the usability test results are in’
‘Tom says, no it’ll be another day’ – Alexa

4) Easy presenter switching
‘Alexa, switch to Tom’s screen’

5) Background fact checking
‘Tom, actually, Instagram only had 2 million users when Facebook acquired them’ -Alexa

I’d now like to prioritize these skillsets by impact to cost ratio and discuss tradeoffs.

1) Must Have: High impact, high cost. This would require Google or Microsoft calendar integration but would really streamline the meetings

2) Must Have: High impact, high cost. This would require users to set up action words, and the syste will need to integrate with google docs or some repository to store the notes for easy access later.

3) Money Pit: Low impact, high cost. This would require integration with hipchat, or slack. Most users that enter the meeting may already be prepared and not use this feature as much.

4) Quick win: High impact, low cost. This would require transferring over the presenter to the fire tv stick or chromecast etc but super useful for participants.

5) Money pit: Low impact, high cost. This is a bad idea and may cause the meeting to decrease in efficiency. Would also require serious AI to know when to chime and and what to say.

In summary, the new skillsets I’d build include 4, 1,2. I think they would be used by a great deal of businesses during meetings, and would really help Amazon to grow business adoption of its electronic devices and increase value to its business arm of products (think aws etc).