Amazon Alexa for Business vs. Cortana (discontinued)

Virtual assistants at work are still new features and have a lot to improve. 
The more features we have, the more we want new features. 
In small environments we have "noise" between virtual assistants, making use inappropriate. 
But in more distributed environments it is very good.
We still have a lot to learn (both, us and our Alexas). 

As a provider of software applications to the legal market there is not a huge amount that the Cortana Intelligence suite can be utilised for though at the speed that new features are being added I suspect that will change very quickly. However the current functionality is clearly really well suited for e-commerce companies or vertical markets where process is very prescriptive and linear.

Incentivized

• Communication between people on the team.
• Interactive personal assistant.
• Better workspace management.

• Ease of Integration for all AI services.
• Reduced time for development.
• A one stop for all AI related services.

Incentivized

• Could have a feature for group chats.
• Alexa has some problems hearing nearby voices.
• Website suggestions are irrelevant sometimes (should have user evaluation functionality for the answer, improving accuracy).

• The language understanding service can be a little overwhelming at first trying to understand the differnces between intents and entities

Incentivized

We looked at two other alternatives: Google Nest and Apple. But Alexa already has popular devices that many people on the team already had in their homes. And it would be easier to integrate into the professional environment. The cost of Amazon products is also much lower, which makes the product more competitive.

IBM Watson Assistant has been early into this market and has improved a lot over time compared to Azure AI Cortana. More documentation related to the services. But Ease of integration Azure AI ranks over IBM Watson Assistant. And again in terms of services offered under the ecosystem, Azure AI precedes IBM Watson Assitant.

Incentivized

• Difficulties with technology integration.
• Identify all possible uses.
• We still lost a lot of time making new settings.

• We do not yet have measurements and impact indicators for the adoption of Azure IA. But I believe it will be of high impact in the years to come.
• We can improve our analysis and optimize team time
• We can improve our digitization

Incentivized