Europcar & Amazon Echo
Business travelers can now make voice-activated
Europcar bookings at their company’s contracted rates on Amazon Echo, the car
rental company has announced.
Europcar is not the first car rental supplier to use
Amazon’s cloud-based Alexa voice service, but corporate & mobility
solutions business unit director Marcus Scholz claimed it is the first to
appear on Echo Show, the version of Amazon Echo that includes a screen. The
screen is used to view multiple-choice options such as which vehicle the
customer wants within a rental category. It also connects premium customers to
Europcar staff on a video-call if additional help is needed.
Europcar said there is no need for travelers to log
into a website, and that reservations will be offered to corporate customers
based on their registered profile and company rental policy. The technology can
also handle rebookings and cancelations, while “the integration of chatbots is
on the roadmap for early 2018,” Scholz said.
Europcar’s “skill” is initially available on Amazon
Echo and Echo Show in Germany, France and the UK.
Alexa just landed her first job. Amazon introduced Alexa for
Business as an artificial intelligence-powered workplace assistant on Thursday at
the Amazon Web Services Reinvent conference in Las Vegas. The move takes workplace AI off
smartphones and computer screens and gets it into offices and meeting spaces as
a voice-activated office guru powered by Amazon Echo.
Alexa's first order of business is the conference room.
Amazon has worked with Polycom and other audiovisual providers to integrate
voice activated functions that will allow employees to speak requests like
"start the meeting" upon which Alexa will call the designated conference
line and engage presentation or virtual meeting equipment. But the retail giant
is also looking to partners like Microsoft, Splunk and Salesforce to provide
additional functionality—what Amazon calls Alexa's "skills."
Employees are invited to join the company's user group and
each employee profile can be configured to access certain skills. In addition
to existing integrations with Outlook calendar and other common enterprise
technologies, businesses can also build unique skills into Alexa based on their
needs.
Business travel is among Alexa's very first skills, courtesy
of Concur. According to a blog post by Concur's innovation incubator Concur
Labs, the company "built an Amazon Alexa skill
using Concur APIs so you can ask Alexa about upcoming business trips, flights,
hotel bookings, and transportation."
That means travelers can ask
Alexa about when they better leave the office to make it to their flight; what
their flight number is; or the name and directions to their hotel. To access
the Concur information, users must say a specific trigger phrase: "Alexa,
ask Concur …" followed by the request. Alexa will then sort through the traveler's
bookings in the Concur system to retrieve the information. Users link their
Concur accounts to Alexa. From there, Alexa recognizes the user's voice to
retrieve their personalized travel information.
Travelers cannot book flights or
hotels via Alexa—at least not yet. And, for now, the current functionality is
limited to select business users during a beta program. Concur is looking at
how to extend Alexa travel skills to more customers through integrations with
TripIt and Hipmunk, both of which were acquired technologies for Concur that
brought lightly managed and unmanaged travelers into the enterprise travel and
expense company's orbit.
According to the Concur Labs blog post, this experiment with Alexa represents just an initial foray into machine learning and AI for the company. "There’s a broad spectrum of tools and capabilities to investigate, and this is only the beginning of what machine learning and early artificial intelligence may bring. We’re looking at what’s emerging, what’s relevant, and what’s possible as new technologies, like Alexa for Business, come to market."