More Hotels, More Echos

19 months ago, I wrote about how the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas was adopting Echos for voice interaction. It took a year plus for the roll out, but Echos started to make it to the suites. You can check out a tour here:

Echos in hotel rooms, especially “budget upscale” (Las Vegas) are likely to make more of an appearance. Last month, Marriott announced it was also rolling out Alexa to its properties.

One of the limiting factors for rolling out a large number of devices on a property was the lack of provisioning tools. However, about half a year ago, Amazon released “Alexa for Business” that provided just that — setting up Echos / Alexa devices for general accounts and locations and being able to configure Skills and access.

One thing that would be interesting is for this functionality to be offered through third party Alexa-enabled hardware, such as clocks from iHome or even Sonos speakers. The other feature — connecting the device to the guest’s Alexa account so that they can order product or access their content while also getting hotel information or accessing the concierge.

That would likely be a challenge but would make the experience magical.