Checking In on Today’s Virtual Assistants

Checking In on Today’s Virtual Assistants

The virtual assistant has become a commonly-known feature of most technology around today. While many people might first associate them with their mobile devices, virtual assistants have been appearing in more and more technologies. What assistants are out there today, and what capabilities do they have? Let’s discuss.

Virtual Assistants, Today and Tomorrow

Today, we know our virtual assistants as the programs we can talk to so that our devices do things like add items to a list, start playing music, create a reminder, or any number of other rote tasks on our behalf. In the future, there is likely to be even more devices that can be controlled via a virtual assistant, especially once society grows past feeling weird as they talk to an inanimate object in public.

Plus, new providers are likely to pop up, expanding the selection of virtual assistants. This will more than likely only exacerbate competition and comparison between those virtual assistants that remain at that point.

Weighing Today’s Assistants

Today, there are five mainstream digital assistants that are well-known and widely available- Google’s Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Samsung’s Bixby.

Alexa

Amazon’s assistant is heavily featured in the e-commerce company’s flagship devices, particularly in their line of Echo smart speakers (although other brands also incorporate Alexa into their speakers as well). Alexa can also be found in Amazon’s tablets, upping the intelligence of television sets in Amazon’s Fire TV product line, and many other Internet of Things devices.

The feature that really stands out with Alexa is the sheer amount of third-party apps (known as skills) that are offered free of charge, with some offering premium features. Alexa is a little more likely to work with the wide variety of smart appliances out there on the market.

While Alexa is definitely an Amazon property, it can be downloaded to Android devices from the Play Store, although this version is reportedly buggy and relatively limited compared to other options.

Assistant

If you have an Android device running 6.0 Marshmallow or higher, you have access to the Google Assistant, as you do if you own a Google Home device or another speaker from certain third-party manufacturers. Assistant can also be found in headphones, smart displays, and televisions, with plenty of languages supported.

As one might imagine from the most available virtual assistant, Assistant is very reliable – although there are reports of some difficulty in getting it to respond at times.

Google’s advantage is being tightly integrated with all of the other Google services, such as Google Calendar and Chromecast. It might not work with as many other products as Amazon’s Alexa, but it’s not far off.

Bixby

This Samsung exclusive is currently compatible with a variety of Samsung devices, including the Family Hub 2.0 refrigerator. Bixby comes in three pieces: Bixby Voice (which allows a user to verbally control a device), Bixby Vision (Samsung’s answer to Google Lens), and Bixby Home (which largely acts as Google Feed does). Version 2.0 of Bixby is also open, allowing other products to use it in their development.

Cortana

Cortana is essentially the Microsoft version of Alexa, except that it is built into every Windows 10 PC instead of Amazon’s proprietary devices. This comparison goes so far in that Cortana also has certain skills to offer – albeit much fewer than Alexa does. If a user doesn’t have their PC handy, Cortana can also be used on Apple and Android devices alike.

Cortana’s most underused yet most compelling capability is intelligently searching your computer for settings, documents, and bringing up relevant data. One of Cortana’s most impressive tech demos early on showed the smart assistant compiling user-friendly stats and graphs from a company’s sales and attendance data.

Siri

The one that arguably started the public fascination with virtual assistants, Siri is an Apple exclusive, available on a wide variety of the company’s products. This includes the smart speaker Apple HomePod. In addition to Apple devices, Siri is compatible with many smart home IoT devices, giving a user the capability to vertiably control their entire area through their voice.

Which virtual assistant is your favorite to use? Tell us why in the comments!

Tip of the Week: 3 Microsoft Office Programs Made for Collaboration

Tip of the Week: 3 Microsoft Office Programs Made for Collaboration

Microsoft is no stranger to improving collaboration with their solutions, as many of them were meant to do just that- improve collaboration.

Below, we’ll discuss three such solutions, and how you can optimize your use of them for collaboration purposes.

OneDrive for Business

While OneDrive for Business’ collaboration really shines when paired with Microsoft Teams, a user isn’t constrained to working within Teams exclusively. OneDrive also enables file sharing with someone external to the team in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. In the application, click Share, which can be found in the upper right-hand corner. You will be presented with a dialog box that gives you a few options. Either you can enter the person’s name or email to send it, or you can get a copy of the link to share with them through other means.

However, if you’re trying to share the document with someone outside of your organization,you will need to select the drop down at the top of the dialog box and say that Specific People can access your file.Once this has been done, these approved users can all edit the file at the same time, in real time, assuming that the link was sent with Allow Editing checked in the dialog box. Keep in mind, this is only for documents that are saved in OneDrive.

Outlook Email

I can already hear you: “Well, of course an email client will help with collaboration!” This is true, however, it is also true that Microsoft has augmented Outlook 2016 with Office 365’s Groups feature. As a result, Outlook has additional collaborative features, most notably, a shared space for a team to leverage for their collaboration. Essentially, Outlook Groups have access to a shared calendar, team inbox, and a document library. These tools allow groups to hold their own conversations, schedule meetings more efficiently, and generally communicate more effectively. Groups are also relatively easy to create, assuming that they have been enabled by your organization’s IT resource:

  • In the Navigation Ribbon, clickthe Home tab.
  • In the Groups section, click New Group.
  • Name your new group in the Choose a name field. The group will be given a suggested email address in the field immediately below, if it is available. Remember, your group name cannot be changed.
  • In the Description field, write a brief mission statement for your group, remembering that it will be shared in every welcome email sent to new group members.
  • Set your group’s Classification from the options provided by your organization.
  • Identify your group’s Privacy level. This defaults to private, where group content is only visible to approved group members, while there is a public option, where anyone in your organization can join and view content.
  • You also have the option to send all of the group’s conversations and any events to all members’ inboxes. They can later change this setting.
  • Once you click Create, you’re done!

Skype for Business

Again, yes, this is technically an application designed for communicating and collaborating, but it also integrates with Outlook to communicate a very useful detail: whether or not a person is available at a given time, depending on what a contact’s Outlook calendar dictates. Therefore, if you’re currently in a meeting, your Skype presence will reflect that you are unavailable. Of course, this feature also allows you to schedule a meeting, even allowing you to list out the topics that meeting will cover and the tasks that you plan to accomplish during a conversation.

Using these Microsoft solutions can help you improve collaboration and communication in your business. Tell us, do you use these tools already, or do you have a different set of favorites that allow you and your staff to collaborate?

Let us know what they are in the comments!

PowerPoint Can Be For More Than Just Presentations

PowerPoint Can Be For More Than Just Presentations

Most offices contain a productivity suite, and most productivity suites will come with some type of slideshow software that can be used to prepare presentations.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool to make slideshows, but it can be used for other purposes that you might not immediately think of. We’ll go over some of the best, including when and how you might want to use PowerPoint.

Creating Infographics

Infographics are a tried-and-true way to get across a lot of information in an easily consumable format, but it can be tricky to use certain solutions to create them.

Right out of the box, Microsoft PowerPoint is easy enough to use. You can create various graphs, images, and word art to build out info graphics designed to convey information in an easy-to-follow format. Since PowerPoint also works on a slide-by-slide basis, this makes it easy to compare and contrast information easily enough.

Making Quizzes

Let’s say that your employees need some security training. You’d rather not create another boring presentation that makes them zone out. You can create an engaging exercise by turning a PowerPoint presentation into a quiz.

For example, you can have one question be on one slide along with the answers to the question in a multiple-choice format. You can then display the answer on a separate slide afterward.

Create Animated Shorts

Did you know that PowerPoint actually has quite a lot of built-in animation functionality?

Using these, you can make simple animated shorts. They might not be terribly intuitive, but they are certainly better than nothing–and it’s a great way to get just a little bit more value out of your slideshow solution.

Onboarding New Employees

All businesses have an onboarding process, but depending on the type of organization, that process will differ.

If your organization has a lot of intensive tasks that need to be explained, a PowerPoint can be a great way to provide information about your company culture, any benefits the employee receives, and other important things that they should know.

This means that you can take a fairly long-winded process and have the employee review the information as they go. What are some ways your business uses PowerPoint? Let us know in the comments.

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