Privacy-conscious citizens may have a reason to avoid staying at Wynn Las Vegas as the hotel has announced plans to outfit its guest rooms with Amazon's Echo.
Wynn said the rollout, a first for both Amazon and Wynn, will begin this month with installation in suites, allowing guests to control room temperature, lighting, drapery and the television using voice commands. By summer 2017, Amazon's voice-controlled speaker will be in all 4,748 rooms at the hotel.
As the project evolves, the company says, personal assistant functions will be added.
Steve Wynn, Chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts, said that what Amazon has done with Alexa is quite perfect. If he has ever seen anything in his 49 years of developing resorts that has made his job of delivering a perfect experience to guests easier and to help his company get to another level, he said it is Alexa.
As TechCrunch correctly highlights, the introduction of a device capable of listening to conversations inside hotel rooms and beaming audio to the cloud will no doubt make some guests feel a bit uneasy. Then again, computers, smartphones and even smart TVs are also capable of being used as spy devices but consumers generally aren't worried about those devices.
Just as those devices do, it ultimately comes down to sacrificing a bit of privacy in the name of convenience.