A Practical Experience on the Amazon Alexa Integration in Smart Offices

Abstract

Smart offices are dynamically evolving spaces meant to enhance employees’ efficiency, but also to create a healthy and proactive working environment. In a competitive business world, the challenge of providing a balance between the efficiency and wellbeing of employees may be supported with new technologies. This paper presents the work undertaken to build the architecture needed to integrate voice assistants into smart offices in order to support employees in their daily activities, like ambient control, attendance system and reporting, but also interacting with project management services used for planning, issue tracking, and reporting. Our research tries to understand what are the most accepted tasks to be performed with the help of voice assistants in a smart office environment, by analyzing the system based on task completion and sentiment analysis. For the experimental setup, different test cases were developed in order to interact with the office environment formed by specific devices, as well as with the project management tool tasks. The obtained results demonstrated that the interaction with the voice assistant is reasonable, especially for easy and moderate utterances.

Working in a smart home environment: examining the impact on productivity, well-being and future use intention

“…The saved time and physical resources can be refocussed on adapting and working efficiently in a home-office context, which may positively affect job productivity and well-being. For example, evidence suggests that employees believe that smart solutions help streamline micro-tasks and focus on business functions, which can boost satisfaction and job performance (Bogdan et al, 2021;Khanna and Jha, 2021). Also, researchers found that the benefits of digital assistants are positively associated with satisfaction, leading to job engagement and productivity (Marikyan et al, 2022).…”

“…Since the pandemic, the use of smart home technology to control work environmental factors has become more widely accessible (Marikyan et al, 2019(Marikyan et al, , 2020Balta-Ozkan et al, 2014b). Research started emerging about the concepts of smart offices (Marikyan et al, 2022;Khanna and Jha, 2021;Bogdan et al, 2021). Employees prefer connected devices, which enable the automated regulation of temperature and light (Bogdan et al, 2021).…”

“…Research started emerging about the concepts of smart offices (Marikyan et al, 2022;Khanna and Jha, 2021;Bogdan et al, 2021). Employees prefer connected devices, which enable the automated regulation of temperature and light (Bogdan et al, 2021). Ambient control of environmental conditions can simplify micro-tasks, leaving more time for core work duties (Khanna and Jha, 2021).…”

Semantic Modeling of a VLC-Enabled Task Automation Platform for Smart Offices

“…With this aim, smart offices must efficiently and proactively manage the infrastructure deployed in the workplace and the enterprise systems [27]. The scientific literature shows different approaches addressing smart offices and identifies the main challenges to tackle in the design, implementation, and optimization of these systems [28][29][30][31]. Shigeta et al [32] propose a smart office system able to recognize the workers' mental and physiological states through several biometric sensors and to adapt the environment to the mood of the users for enhancing their comfort.…”

Sensor Network Simulator Prototype With Real-Time Environmental Data Monitoring to Build Smart Application

“…They are generally grouped in a sensor node that communicates with others through a communication link, resulting in a sensor network capable of measuring environmental conditions [2]. Finally, a concentrator (gateway) collects the data from all the nodes to process them and send them to the internet or another application; among the most common smart device in the market with all these characteristics are Amazon Alexa [3] or Google Home [4]. These allow to control other devices and process their data.…”