Imagine a group of you gather for an impromptu meeting, and Alexa not only tells you what conference rooms are available but also schedules the room of your choice. That’s the vision behind an Alexa skill in development at Beco (check out the proof-of-concept demo), and it demonstrates the enormous potential for Alexa to deliver new experiences, efficiencies, and value in the workplace.
The Beco skill is a location-aware office assistant that combines the natural ease of a voice user interface with the building intelligence of Beco. It’s a mobile platform that uses existing light fixtures to power low-cost iBeacons, a mobile SDK, and cloud services that enable enterprise systems. For clients across sectors, Beco provides indoor positioning, location analytics, and the ability to search for people and places in real time. Learn more about Beco (pronounced “Bee-Co”—and stands for “Be Connected”) here.
The Beco-Alexa skill communicates with a NodeJS application deployed on AWS Lambda. Given a query from Alexa, the NodeJS application maps a person’s name to an email address using a lookup table. Beco provides extensive People vs. Place vs. Time query functionality via a real-time Occupancy API. This RESTful web service allows introspection of a variety of hyper location data.
The skill requires the use of custom-slots in its intents, because people typically give numbers as ordinals (“the 16th floor”) rather than cardinals (“floor 16”). Following are the intents available now and some of their corresponding sample utterances.
Intent |
Purpose |
Sample Utterances |
LocationOfPersonIntent |
Uses the “find by email address” endpoint to find the “Place” where the mobile device of the person-to-be-found is currently located, then speaks the name of the Place. |
|
AvailableRoomsOnFloorIntent |
Uses the “what spaces are free/utilized” endpoint and speaks back the names of those free Places. |
|
The Beco team envisions expanding Alexa integration to include these capabilities:
Another goal is to further extend the skill to provide high-level executive summaries and reporting of Beco-enabled historical data, as per requests like these:
Beco continues development of their Alexa skill and aims to streamline concierge-related resources—saving on time and staffing—and improve the office experience.
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