AI voice assistant-enabled hotel rooms are more than just an Echo away

Design for every guest, with your guests, in your hotel rooms: not just for tech enthusiasts

Alexa-enabled domesticity feels magic to early adopters, and the growth curve looks suspiciously like the early iPhone days. But it’s far from being everywhere yet, and most people won’t understand Alexa on the scale of pinch-to-zoom for some time yet.

More than that, for now, it’s designed for consumers to use in the familiar, repetitive context of their own home. That repetition means individuals can learn voice commands while the product itself can start to build up a better understanding of your accent and patterns of speech in the cloud. It also means you can take the time to register your Amazon account, streaming services and other related accounts. So when you ask for your ‘my jams’ playlist, you get your jams - not someone else’s.

In an unfamiliar hotel room, things get trickier. The lack of visual interface means discovering Skills or commands in a voice UI will be a challenge. This challenge is all the more significant for international hotel guests and their diverse languages, accents and experience of the new technology.

Working out how to introduce these new voice UI room commands to customers is going to be a critical piece of broader service design in hospitality. It’s worth remembering how Amazon teams behind Echo tested early versions of the device - using ‘Wizard of Oz’ methods which refers to a team sat in a room next door to test participants' living rooms and kitchens. Similar techniques, involving real guests in real rooms, will clearly be vital to creating services that match customer expectations set by attentive staff, as well as the leading digital services in their lives.

Build AI voice services in a platform-agnostic way: it is not just about Alexa, and the Amazon Echo

The untold amount of first generation iPod docks languishing in hotel rooms is testament to the fact that it might not be best to blow your capital investment on the most zeitgeisty piece of tech on the market without thinking things through.

For AI voice assistants in particular, it’s not clear who the winners will be yet. Amazon’s platform sits among many others: ones we’ve heard of, and probably some we haven’t.

Fortunately, designing interactions for Google Assistant, Cortana, Siri et al, is unlikely to differ too much from platform to platform once they’ve fully opened-up. The key for those who want to make early investments today is to build the AI voice infrastructure behind the scenes in an extensible way that protects future flexibility if it’s Assistant Actions that win out, not Alexa Skills.

At Kin + Carta, our engineers and architects have already laid the groundwork for a general purpose voice UI architecture to do this. Similarly, we’ve experimented with connected speakers more generally that could be a conduit for Alexa today, as well as other voice assistants in the future should they come to prominence. While the Echo hardware might be the right choice, it’s worth considering alternative, custom installations that keep you flexible for the future.

Explore ways for services to work across interfaces: don’t force everything through voice

Voice is just one part of the continued unbundling of apps, both within devices and into new ones like the Amazon Echo. That means many more connected things around us, and many more ways to interact with software, beyond just loading up an icon on your homescreen.

While AI voice-control alone will take leaps and bounds forward in the coming months and years, the real winners in tomorrow’s world will be interface neutral services: those that span across the screens, speakers and other surfaces around us.

In hospitality, that could mean using voice to summon a room-service menu to your TV screen, or a selection of film titles to order. Voice commands could be a great way for guests to request directions to the nearest sights, restaurants, or bars near to a hotel to be pushed to a smartphone app. Or, voice could be the best way to let you hire a car but allow you choose the model, upload your documentation and find your vehicle later via your smartphone.

From the point of view of staff, a guest’s voice commands could be a way to replace cardboard ‘do not disturb’ signs with digital ones instead displayed in their enterprise apps, alongside requests for cleaning, towels and later check-out.

So it’s not just about ordering an Echo for every room. Plan and build for a future where your customers might want to control your hotel room lights with a phone, smart TV, voice UI, gestures... and yes, maybe even the good old light switch.

To learn more about the unbundling of apps and how voice can fit into your business strategy, get in touch here.