Integrating Alexa Smart Properties for hospitality
I’m Kent (Software Engineer) at Limehome and in this article, I want to share our learning during a PoC of Alexa Smart Properties for hospitality.
I believe everyone appreciate it to be in an hotel and be considered as king. This happens in several ways were the hotel chain, in order to provide the best guest experience usually provides a receptionist, who can fulfill the guest wishes and needs or at least redirect them to the proper service. As we at Limehome plan to revolutionize and digitalize this industry it becomes clear that more focus needs to be addressed to the topic of guest experience. Since the raise and the increased adoption of voice controlled assistants in homes, it becomes an inevitable topic as response to these concerns. That is why I was tasked to investigate the integration of voice controlled assistants in one of our properties as theme for my 3 months thesis.
Motivation
The idea of integrating voice controlled assistants in hospitality is not quite new. However it became popular as a way around the COVID-19 crisis in the industry. The guest can control devices and the room equipment with the voice without having to touch any of them, this reducing a lot the risk of contamination in the room. Although this is the main idea, these devices also offer more to it than just control room equipment. The guest can also easily interact with the customer agent, control when or even if the housekeeping should happen, get more insights about his surroundings (restaurants, bars, café, museum, …), order food and many more. The guest can also use it for more basic stuffs as listening to music, setup alarms similarly to what such devices provides for personal applications in our homes. The list of functionalities we could integrate for our guest with this solution is quite long, but all connected to the same goal: increase our guest satisfaction by improving our guest experience.
Implementation
To implement the solution I chose Amazon Alexa with an Amazon Echo device. Since the Amazon Alexa for Hospitality was not yet available in Europe and to have a simple MVP ready, I went for Amazon Alexa for Business. This is not quite optimal for the hospitality, but for a simple integration it still made sense in order to experiment with it.
I went for a serverless architecture on AWS because we follow the microservices and domain driven architecture at limehome. The service I built mainly focuses on maintaining a AWS Lambda function to handle the Alexa Voice requests from the custom skill, either internally or by forwarding them to the appropriate service (Housekeeping, Property Management System — Apaleo).
Building a custom Alexa Skill works arounds designing the VUI (Voice User Interface) for a particular use case (intent). This represents the Frontend of our skill. The AWS Lambda function on the other hand represents in this case the backend.
For our business MVP I developed a few intents, but here are our two major intents: check out the guest and cancel housekeeping service.
After setting up our system in two of our guest rooms, we decided to monitor the usage through scheduled reports generated by Alexa for Business. Also Amazon Alexa support metrics for the usage of the custom skill.
Learnings
We selected a 3 months time range in which the device was used on site (only 3 rooms in one of our hotel) and got to analyze our metrics.
A couple months after we launched our system we registered 5 calls to our custom skill through our Alexa Device. However Alexa for Business logged more calls to the Alexa Device weekly. More insights to it tells us that these calls are in the music domain (play music, pause, …)
Our take out here is that people are willing to use the voice controlled assistants in hospitality. But to increase the usability of the devices we need
to create more awareness to the guest
so that we can quickly knows, what the services the device offers. I also think it is a good thing that the device is mostly used in the music domain. This means we should tailor this solution also for entertainment purposes like: turning on/off the tv, play a movie on Netflix, …
On the other hand the lower adoption might also means that our guest are still not willing to trust the system. Possible solution would be to let the guest know that disabling the device is still possible, and reassuring the user that the data are not saved (or deleted after a specific period of time — like as soon as they checkout).
Conclusion
Voice controlled assistants create the buzz in our homes, but not only. It is also increasingly a main topic in the hospitality industry. Our MVP showed us that the device still attracts some guests, but we could improve by creating more awareness around this solution. We also discovered a potential domain on were we can start improving the solution which is then entertainment of the guest. Amazon Alexa recently released the new Amazon Smart Properties (includes Hospitality) and they will soon launch in Europe. It will be a great step to move towards this solution of Alexa, as it has better support for hospitality use cases.
By the way, check out the open roles in our Tech and Engineering team.
