Personal digital assistants like Cortana and others have been around for a few years now.
But you may be surprised to learn that they’ll soon be taking a much bigger role when it comes to your business.
According to David Smith, Vice President of World Wide SMB Sales at Microsoft, digital assistants will be taking over more and more little tasks and helping you work smarter at your business:
“What does this mean for small businesses? Well, business owners can already use Cortana on the new Office, to provide rich work related insights and actions. As applications become smarter, personal digital assistants will become more predictive bringing significant productivity benefits to business owners. For example, with Cortana connected to Office 365, she can help business owners prepare for upcoming meetings, search for files, be aware of schedule changes and provide reminders and quick actions when needed.”
He goes on to add that business owners will be able to talk naturally to their digital personal assistants. As a business owner, you will be able to use their digital assistants to do administrative work, so you can concentrate on the key functions in your business that only you can do.
Digital assistants started out several years ago as a limited function. Many treated them as a novelty that soon wore off. At first, digital assistants held promise but, in practice, couldn’t do much. Mostly, you used them to look up a few things in a search engine or on your phone.
Since then, digital assistants have gotten more sophisticated. They are being more deeply integrated with software programs. One of the biggest promises is in predictive activities — they can prompt you and remind you of things.
To learn more about what a digital assistant can do for a small business — and two other key trends impacting small businesses in 2016, read more.
Image: Small Business Trends
Aira Bongco
I think it is because digital assistants will be able to improve over the course of time. They will be able to talk to their bosses as if they are natural assistants.
What’s needed is the ability to access operational information and organizational knowledge using spoken voice commands from any device. The Treycent smartphone, smartwatch, and web apps allow businesses to do just that. No mining of private (intranet) data required.