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Amazon Alexa for Residential is going to let voice assistant control apartment complexes
Amazon launched on Thursday Alexa for Residential, a new initiative intended to make it easy for landlords and property managers to connect Alexa sensors to rental units and build smart apartments. The business bills it as a service that makes the Alexa-enabled home available to everyone, whether they rent or own their house.
Property managers may have unique voice experience for their tenants and no account or computer configuration is needed. You don't even need an Amazon account, either.
But if you have one, you can easily add it to the entire spectrum of Alexa functionality, including the option to contact friends and family and add it to your music playlists.
It's all going to work, the company says, mentioning a lot of convenient-sounding features, such as telling Alexa to remind you when it's recycle day, or to play news and weather. If you have your own Amazon account, you can connect it to handle the system in the unit using your own Alexa software.
Amazon claims property managers do not have access to any tenant info, and voice recordings are automatically erased on a regular basis. If the occupant connects their own account, the desired privacy settings would apply. They will unlink their accounts at any moment, and when the occupant moves out, the in-unit devices can be reset along with the other smart devices in the room.
Okay, look: this is thrilling "house of the future" stuff, and it looks like it might make your life a little simpler. But has anybody ever watched some science fiction program warning us about this kind of thing?
The announcement says Alexa for Residential will allow property managers to give personalized voice interactions that go beyond the walls of their homes and develop unique Alexa skills for each unit in the building to allow residents to handle rent, maintenance demands, amenity reservations, and more.
Going back on all the landlords I've had over the years, I'm not sure I 'd like all of them to tailor the experience that went "beyond the walls" of my apartment. It would be great to be able to trust that all of these privacy problems (that Alexa's kind of hand-wave announcement) would really work as described.
But Alexa 's privacy track record is at best spotty: a Bloomberg study last year showed that Amazon allowed users to listen to and transcribe voice recordings recorded by Alexa-enabled computers. It was also disclosed last year that Amazon did not always erase the customer data that Alexa collected, even though customers told it to do so. The organization later added a "opt-out" to the human analysis of Alexa 's voice files.
And smart apartments are not yet approved by residents. A number of New York City apartment tenants have successfully sued their landlord to demand physical keys in addition to a smart lock.
The tenants' association was worried that the "smart lock" could be used to "track, track and harass residents," alleging that the smart lock could track their comings and goings.
But it's going to be fascinating to see if smart apartments are going to be an upsell for landlords trying to draw tech-savvy residents. The first three firms to use Alexa for residential facilities are IOTAS, Stratis IoT and Sentient Property Services. The businesses are preparing to introduce Alexa to properties in Denver , Colorado, Florida, and Annapolis, Maryland, this autumn, and Amazon is expanding the service to more partners starting today.
