An Alexa for Your Business

Consumers across the globe have gotten into the habit of asking chatbots like Alexa or Siri simple questions, like "When will it stop raining?" and "Who will start game one for the Padres in this year's World Series?" Now that level of consumer chatbot experience is coming to the enterprise, enabling employees to get questions to answers about business data. There are dozens of companies building chatbots for the enterprise, and a handful more that create development kits that let companies build and train their own custom chatbots. TextIt, Reply.ai, and Kore.ai have created their own chatbots to handle mundane tasks. Amazon is in the business with Alexa for Business, which is designed to help employees manage their schedule and to-do lists, while Microsoft has Azure Bot Service, which hooks into communication channels, such as Cortana, Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger.