Alexa for Business brings a conversational UI to help you simplify your meeting room experience. In this session, learn how you can bring Alexa for Business to your meeting room and integrate it with your existing meeting room systems. In addition, the Amazon IT team discusses best practices, and they describe how they piloted and deployed Alexa for Business in over 800 conference rooms at Amazon. 

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Building next generation
conference rooms
Milo Oostergo
PM, Alexa for Business
Scott Rudat
Program Manager Amazon global IT
Sunitha Srivatsa
Software Development Engineer, Alexa for Business
B A P 3 0 3

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Agenda
• Introduction
• Best practices for deployment
• Demo
• How Amazon uses Alexa for Business story
• Building natural, engaging voice experiences in meeting rooms

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
2000’s
1980’s
1990’s
2010’s
1970’s
Character
mode
GUI
Web
Mobile
VUI
abc

6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
We believe voice represents the
next major disruption in computing

7. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Voice enable the workplace using Alexa for Business
Simplifies your
conference rooms
Improves employee
productivity

8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

9. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

11. “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.”

12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Alexa for Business hierarchy
Room
Skill groupSkill group
Room
profile
Organization
Devices
Skill1
Skill2
Skill3

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
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

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Device deployment
• Bulk provisioning using Device Setup Tool
• Enterprise Wi-Fi set up
• Monitoring of devices

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Connecting to WPA2-enterprise
• EAP-TLS support only
• Subordinate CA using AWS Certificate
Manager Private CA
• CRL fetched from S3

17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Device monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch

18. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
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 SDK or AWS CLI
• Rooms can have 1 or more Alexa-enabled devices assigned

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
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

20. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Setting up calendar permissions
Set-CalendarProcessing “<room name>” -DeleteComments $FALSE
Add-MailboxFolderPermission <room name>:Calendar -User alexaforbusiness -AccessRights
Editor

21. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Conferencing provider set up
• Determine meeting event dial-in
parsing rules
• Configure Alexa prompts
• Determine dial-in sequence
User: “Alexa, start my meeting”
Alexa: “There is no meeting on
the calendar. What is your
<Amazon Chime> meeting ID?”
User: 1234567890

22. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Alexa can control most popular systems
• Cisco TelePresence SX, MX, DX
• Cisco WebEx Room kit
• Zoom Rooms
• RingCentral Rooms
• Polycom Group Series
• Crestron 3-Series

23. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
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

24. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Cisco / Polycom Group Series setup

25. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Zoom Room setup

26. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

27. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

28. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Meeting Experience at Amazon

29. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Enter Alexa for Business
• Excited to experiment
• Skeptical about voice

30. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Defining a pilot
• Microsoft Exchange Calendar integration
• Cisco Conferencing Skill
• Amazon Chime integration
• Alexa for Business Gateway

31. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon Meetings Booking Tool

32. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Utterances
• Alexa, start the meeting
• Alexa, end the meeting
• Alexa, ask meetings who the
organizer is
• Alexa, ask meetings to seize the
room
• Alexa, find a free meeting room

33. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Pilot Launch
• 5 Seattle buildings, 800 rooms
• Internal labor to discover and deploy
• Light change management

34. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tracking Adoption
#ax tag to Alexa initiated dial strings
#qk tag to touch panel initiated dial strings

35. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Gathering customer feedback
• Category 1: Use it, love it
• Category 2: Unaware
• Category 3: Is it approved? InfoSec/privacy concerns
• 34% adoption

36. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Customer Feedback / Challenges
Likes
1. Faster meeting start times
2. Convenience, no need to enter
Chime ID
3. Find out who has the room
booked
Dislikes
1. Goes off when we talk about
Alexa
2. Gets unplugged
Challenges
1. Time out with Exchange
2. Unplugging devices
3. Booking protocol

37. “It's amazing to walk into a room while
setting down my coffee and say,
"Alexa, start my meeting" and she get's
things kicked off.
-Amazon employee
Survey Feedback

38. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Driving adoption
• Better change
management
• Multiple communication
channels
• Adoption increases

39. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Change Management

40. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Expanding the pilot
• 8 buildings, 900 rooms
• Sites outside Seattle
• Gateways running in us-east-1 and us-west-2
• Cable management

41. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Learnings
• Only 6 weeks for Alexa for Business usage > touch panel
• Alexa for Business lets me enhance the meeting experience in new
ways

42. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Next steps within Amazon
• Promoting Alexa Voice Services in 3rd party devices
• Rolling out new skills
• Bringing Alexa for Business to all Amazon meeting rooms

43. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

44. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Alexa for Business enables you to add natural, intuitive voice experiences
to your internal applications and systems.
• Helpdesk
• Internal room booking systems
• Company flash briefing
• Access metrics, dashboards, KPIs, etc.
Private skills

45. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Build
• Alexa Skills Kit
• AWS Lambda
Deploy
• Skill Management
API
• ASK CLI
Publish in Skill
Marketplace
Enable as Alexa for
Business private skill
Private skill distribution

46. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Voice interaction models
Custom models:
• Skill developer defines custom interaction model.
• “Alexa ask Helpdesk to replace the broken projector”
• ”Alexa ask WorkNews to give me today’s briefing”
Pre-defined models:
• Provided by the Alexa Skills Kit.
• “Alexa start the meeting”
• “Alexa book this room"

47. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Private skill anatomy
Alexa, tell Help Desk the
projector is not working
Echo
device
Your Internal
Systems
Your Skill

48. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Adding location context to your skills
• Use device location to build
smarter skills
• Call back from Lambda into
Alexa for Business API
{
"RoomArn": ”arn:",
"RoomName": "string",
"RoomSkillParameters": [
{
"ParameterKey": "string",
"ParameterValue": "string"
}
]
}

49. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Meeting room skills with pre-defined voice models
o Conferencing Device APIs to control meeting room appliances
o Join Meeting
o Join Scheduled Meeting
o Discover Devices
o End Meeting
o Room Booking APIs to book conference rooms
o Search Reservations
o Create Reservation

50. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
SearchAvailability Request:
{
"directive": {
"header": {
"namespace": "Alexa.Business.Reservation",
"name": "Search",
"messageId": "15d0ec9d-801d-4f51-9321-206510d64d9c",
"interfaceVersion": "1” },
"payload": {
"nextToken": "pagination-token",
"maxResults": "50",
"query": {
"availability": ["FREE"],
"duration": "PT30M"
"startDateTimeConstraint" : {
"time": {
"type": "INSTANT",
"value": "16:30:00.00Z” }
"date" : {
"type": "INSTANT",
"value": "2017-02-03” }
}
}
}
}

51. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
SearchAvailability Response:
"event": {
"header": {
"namespace": "Alexa.Business.Reservation",
"name": "SearchResponse",
"interfaceVersion": "1",
"messageId": "5f8a426e-01e4-4cc9-8b79-65f8bd0fd8a4” },
"payload": {
"nextToken": "pagination-token",
"reservations": [{
"status": "ResourceStatus.BUSY",
"resourceName": "oscar 101",
"title": "project status",
"organizerName" :"Chris Chew"
"startDateTime": "2017-02-03T16:20:50.52Z",
"duration" : "PT30M",
"reservationToken": "3p-vended-opaque-token” },
{
"status": "ResourceStatus.FREE",
"resourceName": "Day 1 303",
"title": "",
"organizerName" :""
"startDateTime": "2017-02-03T16:20:50.52Z",
"duration" : "PT60M",
"reservationToken": "3p-vended-opaque-token"}]}}

52. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
CreateReservation Request:
{
"directive": {
"header": {
"namespace": "Alexa.Business.Reservation",
"name": "Create",
"messageId": "15d0ec9d-801d-4f51-9321-206510d64d9c",
"interfaceVersion": "1",
},
"authorization": {
"type": "BearerToken",
"token": "<an OAuth2 bearer token provided by 3p for the organization>"
},
"payload": {
"startDateTime": "2017-02-03T16:20:50.52Z",
"duration": "PT30M",
"reservationToken": "3p-vended-opaque-token",
}
}
}

53. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

54. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
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

55. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This is My Skill video series
• Share how your Alexa private skill helps at work, on YouTube
• Send us a link to your video at ThisIsMySkill@amazon.com
• Instructions at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_nQekbcNUI
• Chosen entries get featured on the Alexa for Business website

56. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Milo Oostergo
PM, Alexa for Business
Scott Rudat
Program Manager Amazon global IT
Sunitha Srivatsa
Software Development Engineer

57. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.