These days, there are lots of different ways to control and manipulate technology, but the one with the most promise is voice activation. While we can already use voice commands to drive Google searches, look up restaurants with Siri or book dinner reservations, the wider field of voice-activated technology remains largely untapped.

Amazon is among several major American tech firms who are actively working to make voice activation a standard feature in all of our IoT devices, namely with innovations in the company’s Alexa Voice Service, the platform that runs the Echo smart speaker. Several weeks ago, Amazon announced the launch of a new tool called Echosim.io, which allows developers to test their Alexa-based projects in a web browser. And Alexa has also learned more than 1,000 new skills since the Alexa Skills Kit was released last year. This may not seem like much at first, but it allows developers to cut out any hardware they would previously need to test voice-activated solutions, meaning more developers can utilize Amazon’s software to create their own apps.

And while right now this development largely benefits Amazon in its battle to win over the hearts and minds of loyal Google and Apple fans, technology like Echoism can be seen as the first step in a long journey toward making our smart devices capable of fully understanding and responding to our spoken commands. Even though most solutions that utilize voice commands are viewed more as a novelty than as a business necessity, there are some far-reaching implications for what accurate and responsive voice activated solutions can mean for enterprise IT as a whole.

And voice commands aren’t the only thing to be excited about. Automation as a whole will continue to do wonders for the IT industry, as machines and software no longer need to be monitored by human administrators. That would afford companies incredible cost savings and free up skilled IT workers to spend less time on tasks that could be easily handled by machines. And of course, channel partners will be needed to maintain those automated machines when they inevitably break.

So while Amazon’s echoism.io could be a leap forward for voice-activated technology, it could also be another step in the continuing journey to develop smarter automated technology for the enterprise. In short, channel partners and the enterprise world in general have a lot to be excited about.