Amazon Alexa now supports Office 365 Calendar

Amazon’s connected speakers and other Alexa-powered devices now work with Office 365 calendars, Amazon announced this morning. The addition is one of several in recent weeks that sees Alexa becoming a device that can help you with work, instead of just music, entertainment and controlling your smart home.

Alexa earlier this month added support for Outlook Calendar, which also included access to Hotmail, MSN and Live email accounts. And Google Calendar had been supported since launch. However, these calendars are from consumer-facing email services, while Office 365 is designed for business use.

To enable the new integration, Office 365 commercial customers with Exchange Online mailboxes can link their calendar via the Settings in the Alexa app. Afterwards, you’re able to ask Alexa to provide you with an update on your day, or add meetings and other appointments just by voice.

For example, you could say “Alexa, what’s on my calendar?” or “Alexa, add lunch with Sarah at noon to my calendar,” to have the assistant respond.

This move could see Amazon Echo speakers inching their way into corporate offices – or at least into remote workers’ home offices – while also suggesting there are use cases for a connected speaker that go beyond just having fun.

Given Alexa’s expanding foothold in a work environment – it’s already handy for re-ordering office supplies, after all –  it wouldn’t be surprising to see other work-related applications popping up on the Amazon app store for Alexa (the “Skill” store) in the future.