Alexa for Business brings a conversational UI to help you simplify your meeting room experience. In this session, learn how to bring Alexa for Business to your meeting room and integrate it with your existing meeting room systems. Also learn how to build skills using Alexa for Business Blueprints to enhance your meeting room experience.

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Building next generation meeting rooms
using Alexa for Business
Milo Oostergo
Product manager
Alexa for Business
S V C 2 0 3

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Agenda
• Introduction
• Best practices for deployment
• Demo
• Building natural, engaging voice experiences in meeting rooms

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2000s
1980s
1990s
2010s
1970s
Character
mode
Graphical user
interface
Web
Mobile
Voice user
interface
abc

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We believe voice represents the
next major disruption in computing

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“Gartner predicts that, by 2023, 25
percent of employee interactions with
applications will be via voice, up from
under 3 percent in 2019.”
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-01-09-gartner-predicts-25-percent-of-digital-workers-will-u

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Voice-enable the workplace using Alexa for Business
Simplifies your
meeting rooms
Improves employee
productivity

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Make meetings more efficient with Alexa
“Alexa, is this room free?”
“Alexa, who booked this room?”
“Alexa, book this room for an hour.”
”Alexa, start the meeting.”
“Alexa, extend the meeting
for fifteen minutes.”
“Alexa, end the meeting.”

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Alexa can turn on existing conference
equipment through Echo devices
Deploy Alexa built-in meeting devices
+ +

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Connect with the meeting services you love

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Meeting space management integrations
“Alexa, is this room available?”
“Alexa, book the room.”
“Alexa, extend the meeting fifteen minutes.”

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Native calendar integrations
“Alexa, is this room available?”
“Alexa, book the room.”
“Alexa, extend the meeting five minutes.”
“Alexa, find me a room.”

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Resolve issues faster with Alexa
“Alexa, call the help desk.”
“Alexa, call the front desk.”
“Alexa, ask support to open a ticket about the
broken projector.”

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Keep employees and guests in the know
“Alexa, what’s the guest Wi-Fi password?”
“Alexa, what’s the building address?”
”Alexa, when does the café open?”
”Alexa, do you validate parking?”
“Alexa, how do I register a guest?”

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Engage employees with flash briefings
“…the company launched our new product
last week to much fanfare…”
“…the company picnic is coming up next
Friday”
“…remember, benefits enrollment ends on
March 31st, to sign up…”

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“We have this goal of going fully wireless, with the least
amount of touch possible. You should be able to walk in
and focus on your meeting, and not worry about how to
start it or whether the TVs are set up correctly.”

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Alexa for Business hierarchy
Room
Skill groupSkill group
Room
profile
Organization
Devices
Skill1
Skill2
Skill3

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Bringing Alexa for Business to your meeting rooms
1. Deploy your Alexa-enabled devices
2. Define your locations
3. Enable the skill to control your conferencing equipment
4. Connect Alexa for Business to your calendar system
5. Deploy discovery assets and educate users
6. Measure, improve

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Device deployment
• Bulk provisioning using Device Setup Tool or importing Echo devices from your
personal Alexa account.
• Enterprise Wi-Fi setup
• Monitoring of devices

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Connecting to WPA2-enterprise
• EAP-TLS support only
• Subordinate CA using AWS Certificate
Manager Private CA
• CRL fetched from Amazon Simple Storage
Service

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Device monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch

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Room creation
• Per building create room profiles with common settings such as
address, metric units, wake word, and default address book
• Bulk creation of rooms using AWS Software Development Kit or
AWS Command Line Interface
• Rooms can have one or more Alexa-enabled devices assigned

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Linking Alexa for Business to your calendar system
• Calendar access required to join
scheduled meetings and room
booking
• Office 365 application
permissions vs. delegate service
account
• Room calendar will be read
before organizer’s calendar

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Setting up calendar permissions
Set-CalendarProcessing “<room name>” -DeleteComments $FALSE
Add-MailboxFolderPermission <room name>:Calendar -User alexaforbusiness -AccessRights Editor

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Conferencing provider set up
• Determine meeting event dial-in
parsing rules
• Configure Alexa prompts
• Determine dial-in sequence
{{ID}}@meet.chime.in
User: “Alexa, start my meeting.”
Alexa: “There is no meeting on the
calendar. What is your <Amazon
Chime> meeting ID?”
User: 1234567890.

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Alexa works with most popular systems
• Cisco TelePresence SX, MX, DX
• Cisco WebEx Room kit
• Zoom Rooms
• Polycom Group Series
• Crestron 3-Series
• Polycom Trio 8500 and 8800 (native Alexa integration)

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Cisco/Polycom Group Series setup
• Connecting Alexa to your Cisco and Polycom Group Series endpoints on your
local network
• Running Alexa for Business Gateway in high-available configuration
• Device discovery

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Cisco/Polycom Group Series setup

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Zoom Room setup

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Change management

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Driving adoption
• Change management
• Multiple communication
channels
• Adoption increases

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Alexa for Business enables you to add natural, intuitive voice experiences to your
internal applications and systems
• Help desk
• Internal knowledge-base systems
• Access metrics, dashboards, key performance indicators, etc.
• Internal room-booking systems
Private skills

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Build
• Alexa Skills Kit
• AWS Lambda
Deploy
• Skill management
API
• ASK CLI
Publish in Alexa Skills
Marketplace
Enable as Alexa for
Business private skill
Private skill distribution

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Private skill anatomy
Alexa, tell Help Desk the
projector is not working
Alexa
device
Your internal
systems
Your skill

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Adding location context to your skills
• Use device location to build
smarter skills
• Call back from Lambda into Alexa
for Business resolveRoom API
{
"RoomArn": ”arn:",
"RoomName": "string",
"RoomSkillParameters": [
{
"ParameterKey": "string",
"ParameterValue": "string"
}
]
}

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No code required
• Choose from dozens of templates
https://blueprints.amazon.com/a4b?s
ource=pres
• Button on the Alexa for Business
console takes IT admin to this URL
• A4B console can also generate a
sample email to employees with
instructions for anyone to create and
submit skills
• Fill in the blanks to create an Alexa
skill in minutes

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Choose from dozens of templates
Organizations and Businesses templates include:
• Business Q&A
• Allows you to enter your own custom questions and answers
• “Alexa, ask Office Helper who’s in charge of social media?”
• Wiki
• Ask where and how-to questions, good for newly onboarded employees, new student
orientation
• “Alexa, ask Team Guide, where’s the cafeteria?” “What are the hours for IT?”
• Flash Briefing
• Add an audio RSS feed or record audio right from your browser

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Publish the Blueprint as a private skill
• Skill creator can now choose “Alexa for
Business” option when publishing
their skill
• This creates the skill as a private skill
which is NOT published to the Skill
Store

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Distribute the private skill to the company
• After the skill goes live (~20 minutes) the skill creator enters the Alexa for
Business ARN associated with the company to submit the skill using “Manage
Access” in the Skill Blueprints site
• IT admin can then review and enable the skill for the company’s enrolled users
and managed endpoints (shared devices)

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Get started today
• Setup your Alexa for Business account at console.aws.amazon.com/a4b
• Visit the Alexa for Business Getting Started page at
https://aws.amazon.com/alexaforbusiness/getting-started/
• Download Alexa for Business code starter samples:
https://github.com/alexa/alexa-for-business
• AWS Serverless Application Repository:
https://serverlessrepo.aws.amazon.com

48. Thank you!
S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Milo Oostergo
moosterg@amazon.com