A modern, simple way to add Alexa to residential properties
Amazon introduced Alexa for Residential on Thursday, a new program designed to make it easier for landlords & property managers to add Alexa devices for building smart apartments (smart apartments? intelligent?) to rental units. The company bills it as a service “that makes it available to everyone to have an Alexa-enabled home, no matter whether they rent or own their house.”
Alexa for Residential is a brand new service that offers residents a wireless Alexa-friendly, smart apartment with no required configuration.
Property managers can give their residents “custom voice experiences,” & no account or device setup is required. You wouldn’t need an Amazon account at all. But if you have one, you can “simply integrate it to the full range of Alexa features, along with the ability to call friends and family,” and connect it to your music playlists.
“It’ll all work,” says the company, listing a slew of convenient-sounding features, such as asking Alexa to remind you when it’s repurposing day or playing the news and weather. If you do have your own Amazon account, you can use your own Alexa app to connect it to manage the device within the unit.
Home automation controls are some of Alexa’s most common features. And 84 per cent of tenants want an apartment with smart home facilities, according to the National Apartment
Association, 61 per cent of whom said they’d pay a monthly charge for a voice assistant. Integrators sell apartment smart home services but were unable to provide voice as part of these packages residents had to buy, set up, & customize their Alexa-enabled devices itself.
Image credits: www.businesstoday.in
Amazon claims that landlords have not accessed any tenant data.
Amazon says property managers will not have access to any tenant details, & regular voice recordings are erased automatically. If a resident joins up their account, the privacy settings they choose will apply. They can retrieve their accounts at any time, and when the tenant moves out, they can reset the in-unit devices along with the other smart devices in the apartment.
Alright, the future is exciting and smart more then we all expected, it is indeed fun things like “home of the future”, and it seems like it can make your life better than ever before with comfort. But has anyone ever watched any shows of science fiction telling us about this kind of thing?
The announcement says Alexa for Residential would allow property managers “to deliver personalized voice interactions that go beyond the walls of their units” & create custom Alexa skills for each unit installed in a building allowing residents to manages-rent, request queries for repairs, and Maintenace, reservations, and more.
I’m not sure if I would’ve wanted one of them to customize an experience “beyond the walls of my apartment, thinking about all the landlords I had over the years. It would be nice to believe that all these privacy complications (which are the handwaves of Alexa’s announcement) will work as stated.
A Recent Bloomberg analysis
Alexa’s privacy track record is at best compared to others: a Bloomberg analysis last year found that Amazon allowed people to listen to & transcribe voice recordings recorded by Alexa-enabled devices. Last year, Amazon also disclosed that Alexa didn’t always erase user data, even though its users told it
Subsequently, the company added an ‘opt-out’ on Alexa’s Voice Checks.
Although tenants do not always accept smart residences.. In addition to a smart lock, a group of residents of New York City took a legal action their landlord successfully. The group of tenants expressed fear that the smart lock “could be used to” supervise, monitor & suppress tenants, “claiming that the smart lock might track their daily movement activities.
Increased need for smart apartments with voice functionality
The demand for voiced stylish apartments & communities – Alexa for Residential, which offers you in your home – can be met by property managers. In the past, it was time-consuming and expensive to implement spoken experiences on apartment complexes as property managers had no means of resetting or handling several devices at once.
The property managers must manually reset every device or buy new devices each time a resident is moved out. The Alexa-enabled devices are now permanent fixtures inside the home with Alexa for Residential. Property managers can remotely reset devices to standard settings if people move out to ensure the integration of Alexa with the Smart Homestays untouched.
Hence it is amusing to see if smart apartments become a retailer for property owners who seek to attract tech-geeks tenants.
“Whether you rent or own a building with Alexa, it enables residential property managers to have custom-tailored voice experience for their customers — including info on property & customer services,” said Liron Torres, Amazon Alexa’s Smart Properties Head.
Image Credits: www.wfmj.com
Alexa for Residential goes beyond the ideal home of the smart house
Alexa has used holiday rentals for similar integrations of its properties, as well as senior living complexes. There are also separate smart home automation systems designed for property managers and Alexa’s skills.
In specific, Amazon has built additional services and announced collaborations that can expand Alexa’s usage in households via B2B agreements, such as the 2018 launch of Alexa for Hospitality or it’s dealing with home builders, including Lennar, to integrate devices into their new building.
Since some think popular devices are raising questions about privacy and other implementations were not taken seriously.
Amazon Alexa as a residential service is used by these three businesses IOTAS, Stratis IoT & Sentient Property Services. Alexa will be decided to bring its benifits to Denver, Colorado, Florida, and Annapolis, Maryland this fall, & Amazon is planning to expand the network to more partners.
As an IoT provider that provides solutions to the multifamily industry, Amazon Alexa all wants to make residents as well as management teams happy, effective, and easy to take on, “said Sce Pike, IOTAS CEO.” Incorporating Alexa for residents to our platform is the perfect match because it makes the smart group experience even simpler & More fun for both sides.
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