Amazon.com Inc. hopes to grow enterprise adoption of Alexa by making it easier for companies to customize the voice assistant to their needs.

The technology giant on Thursday launched Alexa for Business Blueprints, a collection of templates that will enable workers to extend the service’s feature set without writing any code. They’re rolling out about a year after Amazon introduced a voice template feature for consumers.

The basic concept hasn’t changed: Users can create custom voice skills in a drag-and-drop wizard that compresses the development process into a few minutes. There are quite a few work-related scenarios where Alexa for Business Blueprints can come handy. Most of them involve helping employees find needed information faster.

A company could, for instance, create a skill to let Alexa answer questions such as “How do I set up corporate email on my phone?” that would normally require users to email administrators. Alexa for Business Blueprints can also be used to keep staffers updated about upcoming events such as product launches. A third potential application is employee onboarding: The templates let firms program office layout details into Alexa to help hires find their way around the workplace.

The templates are rolling out to Alexa for Business, the enterprise version of the voice assistant that Amazon introduced back in 2017. Its main differentiating feature is a management console that lets administrators centrally configure and monitor their company’s Alexa devices.

This centralized control also extends to the new Alexa for Business blueprints. Administrators can manage their organizations’ custom skill catalogs in one place, while making it straightforward for users to submit new additions.   

“Using a link provided by the company’s Alexa for Business administrator, anyone, whether an executive assistant, salesperson, line of business owner, or IT admin, can use any available Skill Blueprint on the Alexa Skill Blueprints website to create, test, and then publish a private skill,” Amazon product marketing manager Ben Grossman wrote in a blog post. “Once distributed, the company’s IT admin can then review and enable the skill for the organization’s shared devices and enrolled users.”

Amazon counts big names such as General Electric Co., Condé Nast Inc. and MicroStrategy Inc. among the companies that use Alexa for Business. The company also continues to lead the consumer segment of the voice assistant market, recently disclosing that it has shipped more than 100 million Alexa-powered devices to date.

Photo: Amazon