Wynn Las Vegas to put an Amazon Echo in every hotel room by summer 2017

Hotel company Wynn Resorts today said that it will place an Amazon Echo smart speaker inside every one of the more than 4,700 hotel rooms in it Las Vegas hotel by summer 2017.

“The resort will be the first to have an Echo in every room that enables guests to voice-control all of the smart home features of their room,” an Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

Alexa at Wynn Las Vegas will be able to do things like control lights, temperature, drapes, and the television, as well as access more than 6,000 skills in the Amazon skills marketplace. More features may be added in the future, including a Wynn Las Vegas personal assistant.

“The thing that Amazon has done with Alexa is quite perfect. If I have ever seen anything in my 49 years of developing resorts that has made our job of delivering a perfect experience to our guests easier and help us get to another level, it is Alexa,” said Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn in a statement released today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QM7izjVqug

Following the release of Google Home, no doubt the biggest competitor to the Amazon Echo in October, both Google and Amazon have taken steps to give their intelligent assistants an edge in the market.

Last week the Google Assistant platform launched for third parties so that developers and businesses can begin to make their own custom commands. Early partners from large companies and startups will roll out actions in the coming weeks.

For Amazon’s part, improvements were made to the Alexa Skills Kit last week that will add smarts that make it easier to chat about music, movies, and local businesses. The company also announced plans for the Lex bot framework and released its first deep learning services at AWS re:Invent.