Time Nyack Experimenting with Amazon’s Alexa
After making waves with its trendy design and lavish opening party, The Time Nyack is now making hotel tech news with in-room personal digital assistants. Kerry Medina writes in tnooz about how the Dream Hotel Group is beta testing Amazon Alexas in Time Nyack through the end of the year.
[Christian Cooper, vice president, IT at Dream Hotel Group] acknowledges that Alexa was designed primarily for residential use, so part of the beta testing phase is to evaluate how the technology is most applicable to hotel guests and how securely it can be deployed within the commercial environment of hospitality.
Other concerns include guests engaging with the technology only to listen to music or worse, unplugging it.
In Nyack, Alexa has proven practical as a virtual butler service as hotel guests use the device principally to make service requests; be it to ask for additional towels, a wakeup call or even order room service.
Delivering a heightened and more efficient guest experience is precisely why the company chose to test Alexa, which is also a boon for TripAdvisor reviews.
Cooper recently noticed guests are specifically and positively calling out the technology in their reviews of the hotel.
Looking to the future, Dream Hotel Group plans to integrate Alexa with other technologies like in-room automations that control guest room lighting, blinds and even HVAC functions.
What’s an Alexa? What’s an Echo?
Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon, first used in the Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo Dot devices developed by Amazon Lab126. It is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real-time information, such as news. Alexa can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation system.
Alexa offers weather reports provided by AccuWeather and news provided by TuneIn from a variety of sources including local radio stations, NPR, and ESPN. Additionally, Alexa-supported devices stream music from the owner’s Amazon Music accounts and have built-in support for Pandora and Spotify accounts. Alexa can play music from streaming services such as Apple Music and Google Play Music from a phone or tablet. Alexa can manage voice-controlled alarms, timers, and shopping and to-do lists, and can access Wikipedia articles. Alexa devices will respond to questions about items in the user’s Google Calendar.
The name Alexa was chosen due to the fact that it has a hard consonant with the X and therefore could be recognized with higher precision. The name is also claimed to be reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which is also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason.– Wikipedia
You can read Kerry Medina’s full article at Dream Hotel Group is test-driving Alexa and Alice to enrich guest stays, at tnooz.
As Others See Us is an occasional feature that publishes what writers outside of Nyack say about the people and places in the Lower Hudson Valley.
See also:
- As Others See Us: The Time Nyack Hotel, 5/29/2016
- Time Nyack Hotel Dazzles in Debut, 5/25/2016
- NYLO Nyack: Chic Loft Hotel Planned Near Thruway, 6/21/2013