Hotels are getting smarter and more hi-tech in this day and age, what with certain hotels choosing to equip their rooms with smart locks that can be unlocked via smartphones, or like the Wynn Las Vegas which has equipped its rooms with Amazon Echo devices. Now it seems that Marriott is also considering voice assistants for its rooms, and are trying to decide between Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
In a report from Bloomberg, Marriott International is testing out devices from both companies at its Aloft Hotel in Boston’s Seaport district. The usage of Siri and Alexa will allow guests to control certain aspects of their room using just their voice, such as turning the lights on and off, closing the drapes, adjusting the room temperature, changing television channels, and so on.
The company is expected to make their decision by mid-year, a decision which could help propel either service to greater heights. At the moment we know that Apple is interested in home automation via HomeKit and its Home app, and having Siri being used to control features in a hotel room would make for great advertisement.
However Amazon’s Alexa has been gaining a fair bit of traction, thanks largely in part to Amazon’s decision to make Alexa available to third-party developers and device makers. Either way we’ll have our results by 2017.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence), Alexa, Amazon and Siri.