Live from HR Tech: Managing Payroll by the Sound of Your Voice with Paychex Voice Assist Technology

At this year’s HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas there was no shortage of innovative, ground-breaking, and simply cool new solutions for attendees to see, touch, and in one case, speak with!  I was fortunate to have a few spare minutes during the Conference to take a kind of whirlwind tour of the massive HR Tech Expo and see many of these innovative solutions firsthand, and one of these new technology breakthroughs was so interesting and fun, I wanted to try it out myself. I’m referring to the new Paychex Voice Assist solution from my long-time friends at Paychex, an innovation in voice interaction technology that allows organizations and HR, Payroll, and business leaders to receive real-time payroll data insights, review and approve employee rate changes, add new employees, and submit checks for payday — all via secure, voice-enabled technology for an efficient, smooth, and hands-free experience.

Check out the below video recorded at the Paychex booth at HR Tech where Amanda Miller from Paychex takes us through the Voice Assist interactions and processes, integrated with the Paychex Flex platform, which enables busy leaders to get insight, make updates, and process their payrolls quickly and easily – with no laptop needed!

A couple of quick comments on the video and demo. I did want to “run” the demo using my own voice, but the Expo Hall was pretty loud, and the voice device had already been trained to recognize Amanda’s voice, so in order not to take up extra time, we thought it was a good idea to have Amanda “talk” us through the payroll process. Next, there a couple of quick edits to the video above, but they are in there for explanatory reasons, not because the actual process of submitting the payroll via Voice Assist technology was slow or required much waiting. It was probably the quickest way to submit a payroll that you will ever encounter. And Paychex data from their 700,000+ clients show that the vast majority of payrolls can be executed with minimum interventions and changes – the HR, payroll, or business leader simply needs to run the next payroll with very similar or even the same data as the prior payroll – making Paychex Voice Assist a perfect option for them in most cases.

Finally, I personally have been aching to see more applications of voice technology and interactions with smart speakers like the ones from Google and Amazon work their way into the HR technology space. I was an extremely early adopter of voice enabled tech in my home, and it is a little bit embarrassing how many times I “talk” to my smart speaker and smart display every day. To me, it has always made perfect sense for these technologies, originally designed for and widely adopted in the consumer market, to become an option and even a standard method to interact with our workplace technology. It has take quite a while to see this capability begin to emerge in HR tech, and Paychex is clearly leading the way in these efforts.

Many thanks to my friends at Paychex for showing me the Voice Assist solution and well done on a fantastic HR technology innovation. Learn more about Paychex Voice Assist at paychex.com.