Amazon Is Bumping Into Microsoft With 'Alexa For Business

Amazon has cut back its work by collaborating with other technology giants.

Anyone using Amazon's Fire TV will not be able to access YouTube since January 1, and Google has blocked access to the site for anyone using the new Amazon Echo Show device.

The reason: Google is upset that Amazon will not carry its products, including Chromecast and Google Home. (Search Google Home on Amazon.com and the echo appears instead).

Things are not so tense with Microsoft, but they could get there.

Earlier this year, the two companies announced an association in which their respective digital assistants, Cortana and Alexa, could talk to each other.


Now Amazon has announced that Alexa will be available for office workers, with little mention of Cortana or Microsoft in the company's official announcement.

Employers can configure their own skills for Alexa, such as dialing a conference call or booking a meeting room, or connecting with other business services such as Concur and Splunk.

Amazon is moving boldly in an area where Microsoft could be said to have already planted its own flag with Cortana, a service that has 145 million monthly active users according to Microsoft.

Currently, Cortana's business work focuses on helping Office users.

For example, it will analyze the responses by email and notify you if you have told someone to look for something "later today", then ask separately if you want a reminder for the task.

Later, Microsoft says that Cortana could use its integration with LinkedIn to inform her about the people at her next meeting.

But in real-world office space, Alexa seems ready for an early move and probably early dominance.

The question now is whether Alexa will also cross the area of ​​expertise of Cortana controlling the software of the workplace.

It would not be an exaggeration to say ... probably.

Amazon has had a great advantage in courting third-party developers to create skills for Alexa. Already on the smart domestic front, the digital assistant has more than 20,000 skills.

It is not clear how many skills Cortana has today, but in May 2017 there were only 46 in comparison. The true strength of the assistant is in Microsoft's basic Office products.

It is true that many of the skills for both attendees are marketing gimmicks. Think of Patron's Alexa skill, which allows you to ask Alexa, to ask Patron, for ideas on how to prepare a cocktail.

It's a mouthful However, asking Alexa to ask another party to do something is the basis of the Amazon and Microsoft partnership: users will have to ask Alexa to activate Cortana and vice versa.

And as it happens, Amazon said in its official announcement that Alexa for Business would allow users to link to their Microsoft Exchange calendars, without clarifying if they would have to go through Cortana to do so.

It seems doubtful that the two companies will end up with deep collaboration, according to Richard Windsor, an analyst at Radio Free Mobile, in part because of its cumbersome nature. "It seems that Amazon is reducing its partner by going to the company completely independently of its partnership with Microsoft," says Windsor.

Cortana has been struggling, she adds, because Microsoft originally designed the assistant to work on phones, so many of her skills are not relevant to working at a desk. 70-417 VCE

There is an argument that with the mobile era approaching, the next wave of computing will be driven by environmental interfaces. In other words, computers will be around us and we will probably be talking to them.

That puts Amazon in a strong early position with the Echo, and it's easy to foresee that office workers who speak with Echo devices ask for a new printer role, book a meeting room or change the temperature.

Windsor believes that "there is no reason why" Alexa does not extend to the desktop and more deeply in Microsoft Office, and suspects that it will be much more difficult for the two assistants of the companies to collaborate due to the possible cross between Microsoft and Amazon Web. Services (AWS).

The two companies are, of course, great rivals in cloud computing.

Alexa for Business "has the scope to generate more skills and applications for Alexa," says Windsor, "but also to generate greater loyalty to AWS."

That is a result that would prove even the strongest association.