Aloft Hotel Adds Siri-Equipped Rooms
At two Aloft Hotels, you can change your room's temperature, lighting and music by yelling at Siri.
By David Murphy •
This story originally appeared on PCMag
Hey Siri, fluff my pillow and make sure I'm awake at 7 a.m. for my workout. And make me a coffee at 6:55 a.m. so I can wake up to that sweet aroma, slam it and run out the door. Now, tell me a bedtime story.
That's an ambitious list of tasks for Apple's digital assistant, but some vacationers will soon get a chance to have Siri serve as their digital butler if they're staying at either the Santa Clara or Boston Seaport Aloft Hotel. If you're in one of the hotel's new Siri-equipped rooms, you'll get an iPad to play around with that comes with a customized app that lets you control many of the room's options by yelling "Hey Siri."
"Forget the phrase 'at the touch of your fingertips.' Today's early adopter, hyper-connected global traveler wants a level of personalization unlike ever before, and that means being able to control their hotel experience with the sound of their voice. We're thrilled to be the first hotel brand to bring voice activation to our guests in this way, using Siri to control room temperature, lighting and more during their stay," said Brian McGuinness, global brand leader at Aloft Hotels, in a statement.
Personalized welcome screens on the aforementioned iPads will help guests familiarize themselves with what they can (and can't) do by yelling at Siri. It'll also be the way in which each guest (or one guest, speaking on behalf of the room's occupants) gets the iPad to recognize his or her voice for "Hey Siri" commands.
Once set up, guests will be able to use Siri to control their room's temperature (thanks to the room's HomeKit-enabled Ecobee thermostat), adjust the room's Philips Hue lighting, turn music on and off (so long as guests sign into their iTunes accounts on the iPad first) and figure out various attractions to visit around their particular hotel. It stands to reason that guests will also be able to use Siri for most of the conventional requests they might normally use Siri for: setting alarms, figuring out complex mathematics and other queries like that.
Aloft will reset the iPads upon checkout.
