Amazon’s Echo speakers may be used mainly in the home, but putting the listening / privacy fears aside, they can be useful in a business setting, particularly in small business settings / home offices. With this in mind, here are four skills commands that could help you:

Create Reminders – Alexa can act like a personal assistant. For example, you can tell Alexa exactly what you need to remember e.g. business appointments on certain days / times and it will remind you of that task and time. To create a reminder, say the task and its time such as, “Alexa, remind me to review customer accounts 10 a.m. every Monday”.

Create Distinctive Voice Profiles – By setting up voice profiles, Alexa can distinguish who is issuing the command e.g. different people in the office can ask “Alexa, what’s on my calendar?” Ask Alexa for details of how to do it.

ChatBot Skill – By enabling the ChatBot skill, workers can audibly request Alexa to post on their behalf. This can aid productivity. It can be achieved by linking an Amazon account to a Slack account. Users can then post to a specific channel by asking simply Alexa.

Find Your Phone – You can use Alexa to help you find your phone by using your voice. This is a free skill available from Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076PHYQD2?ie=UTF8&ref-suffix=ss_rw. The phone should ring even if it is on silent. It may not work if your phone is in Do Not Disturb mode, but you can add multiple people by name to call different phones instead of just one.

Currently being tested and likely to come out soon in an update is a browser history for your Windows desktop known as ‘Timeline’. This feature will allow you to search through files, apps and sites you’ve previously had open, and jump back and pick up what you were doing.

What’s more, it will extend to PCs, Android handsets and iPhones running Microsoft’s Cortana. This means that you will be able to resume what you were doing on another device. Cortana will also suggest tasks to continue.

How it will work:

1. An icon will be added (bottom left, next to search) on the Windows 10 desktop.
2. Clicking the icon will show the running applications.
3. Timeline activities will be displayed below this, plus a vertical dated timeline will be shown on the right-hand side of the screen. You will be able to see activities you were working on in the past and quickly click back to them.

Keep an eye out for this helpful feature in the next update.

If your work involves having different jobs that need different sets of apps, or if you need to have lots of different things open and you only have one monitor, you may find that it helps to create multiple desktops.

To create multiple desktops:

• Click on the task view button next to the search bar on the taskbar.
• Go to the button at the bottom-right corner of your screen labelled ‘+ New desktop.’
• Click on this to create a new desktop.
• To switch between desktops, click on the task view button and then, click on either of the thumbnails at the foot of the screen.