Voice in Hotels
Eight years ago, I was pitching the use of voice in hotel rooms. It was going to be the future where you could walk into any room and play music, control lights, and even order your car from the valet.
However, despite Echos at one point being ordered by the thousands for some hotel brands, voice never caught on. There are interesting applications like “Hey Disney” in Disney resorts but for the most part, voice isn’t widespread.
Why? The value has to be created through optimizing the workflow. When requests come in, how are they handled? Who looks at them and assigns them? If you need your car brought up from the valet, do you need to provide the ticket number or is that assigned to your room number and the information passed along when you make your request?
Voice in many scenarios is just the actuator. The mechanisms to make the rest of the processes work still need to be put in place.
