One of my favorite types of technology to emerge in recent years has been the digital virtual assistant. The Echo and Alexa from Amazon has been around for nearly four years now. However, with the emergence of other devices that feature digital virtual assistants like one from Google and another from Apple, they are becoming more mainstream.

I’ve had one from Amazon for a couple years now and I love what I can do with it for more personal life. That includes placing orders for products and groceries, ordering a pizza, changing the thermostat and calling for an Uber. Lately, however, this digital virtual assistant has become a great help in business life. And it’s a form of technology that more startups should consider implementing in the workspace. Here’s why.

Task Masters  

The companies behind these digital virtual assistants are adding artificial intelligence and numerous tools so that you can give them a wide range of tasks to take care of within your business. According to a PC Magazine article, developers and companies can incorporate things like the Alexa Skills Kit and Actions on Google to add voice technology to practically everything a business needs to do. This includes expense tracking, e-commerce, fleet management and email marketing. All of these applications can be handled by using voice command to get the tasks done.

In terms of being a developer myself, I’ve used my digital personal assistant to help me work on various features and coding for the apps I build for my company. It’s like an extra pair of hands and brain for me.

Fact Checker And Math Wizard

While I already use my digital personal assistant to look up information I would have otherwise had to type into Google, it’s now being used to do the same thing in terms of business research, tech questions and calculations. This allows me to keep working while the information is retrieved, and then I can immediately input the answers as my digital virtual assistant is providing me with those details.

Additionally, I have allowed my digital virtual assistant access to company data for certain projects, which allows me to call up specific information that I need to take care of a question or complete something I’m working on. This type of feature would also be ideal for sales and marketing teams to quickly access certain information. Even content writers and other team members could benefit from the convenience factor of using a digital virtual assistant to deliver information to them.