“Alexa, should I split these 8s?”
Hotel guests won’t quite be able to ask that question when the Wynn Las Vegas adds Amazon Echo to all 4,748 rooms next summer, but they should be able to close the curtains, dim the lights and other simple tasks by talking to their temporary voice-activated hotel roommate.
That's right. Integrators supplying clients with Amazon Echo, or even thinking about adding the technology to their repertoire, may soon have a new avenue of work in the hotel business as hotel rooms become more and more like mini homes.
Guests will be able to control lights, room temperature, drapery and the television, though more features may be added in the future. It's not clear that guests will be able to buy anything from Amazon with Alexa at the Wynn, though.
Having Amazon Echo in all guests rooms will also give guests basic information about their rooms and the hotel without having to call the front desk.
A New Kind of Butler
To say that Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn is impressed with Alexa is an understatement.
“I have never, ever seen anything that was more intuitively dead-on to making the guest experience seamlessly delicious, effortlessly convenient, with the ability to talk to your room and say: ‘Alexa, I am here, open the curtains, lower the temperature, turn on the news,’” says Wynn. “She becomes our butler at the service at each of our guests.”
Wynn says technology has always played an important part in his resorts, but he’s never quite seen anything like Alexa.
More: Inside an Amazon Echo Voice-Controlled Game Room
“The thing that Amazon has done with Alexa is quite perfect,” says Wynn. “I have ever seen anything in my 49 years of developing resorts that has made our job of delivering a perfect experience to our guests easier and help us get to another level, it is Alexa.
“The ability to talk to your room is effortlessly convenient. In partnership with Amazon, becoming the first resort in the world in which guests can verbally control every aspect of lighting, temperature and the audio-visual components of a hotel room is yet another example of our leadership in the world of technology for the benefit of all of our guests,” he says.
While the idea of a listening device in your Vegas hotel room may seem startling for some guests, what happens in Vegas should (hopefully) still stay in Vegas, according to CNBC. Guests can hit the mute button on the Echo. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said the mute button used on devices like the Echo is harder to hack than a smartphone.
Here’s more from Steve Wynn talking about the importance of technology in hotels:
