Virtual Conference Manager
The Future of Business Communications:
How Our Awesome New Technology Will Make Your Life Way Easier
It’s 8:50 a.m. You have a crazy important meeting at 9am, and you’re running late because you hit every single red light on the way to the office. You’re the host; no one but you can open up the conference line. Your smartphone died (because you forgot to charge it after West World) and your slow computer will take forever to boot up. AND you forgot to forward the invite to the crankiest CMO in the world, whose punctuality is the stuff of legend.
It’s 8:59. After an interminably long elevator ride you sprint to the meeting room, enter and say “Alexa, tell conference manager to start my call.” The call starts. Seconds later, you remember your CMO and ask, “Alexa, please add the CMO to this meeting.” Knowing that the CMO has just received a text with the dial in (right on time!), you collapse into your seat as introductions begin.
Introducing Virtual Assistance for the Business World, courtesy of the Vonage Cloud.
Vonage is happy to announce that we just demonstrated this new technology—Vonage Conference Manager– at Amazon re:Invent. And, it’s only one of the many innovations we’re creating for the future of business communications. Our goal? To create new ways to communicate, to solve real problems, and to make lives just a little bit less frustrating (because there’s already too many red lights in life.)
So, how does it work?
It’s another cool evolvement of the Internet of Things, and it harnesses the power of the cloud (which is what we’re really, really, ridiculously good at).
Vonage Conference Manager is actually pretty simple. It works like this:
- Get an Amazon Echo. Each “smart” meeting room has an Amazon Echo placed in it permanently.
- Sync the Echo. The Echo is mapped to the physical phone within each room and an organizational directory, which accesses calendars, meeting information and contacts, all through the cloud.
- Enable Vonage Conference Manager. Once the Echo is synced, the Vonage Conference Manager skill is enabled once through an iPhone or at alexa.amazon.com.
- Include the room on invites. When you schedule a meeting, be sure to add the room so it knows about the meeting, so you can use the Echo while you’re in the room.
- Start talking. When it’s time for your meeting to start, just walk into the room and say “Alexa…” to begin. Bam! You’re all set.
What’s Next
Right now, this technology is available in beta for individual Echo users with a Google calendar account. We’ll be rolling it out for more platforms and users very soon, so stay tuned!