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The Wynn Las Vegas is putting an Amazon Echo in every hotel room

The Wynn Las Vegas is putting an Amazon Echo in every hotel room

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Control everything in the room with your voice — but what about privacy?

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The Amazon Echo is becoming a hotel room luxury, and maybe a potential privacy concern for guests. Less than a month before the technology industry heads to Las Vegas and CES 2017, the Wynn Las Vegas just announced that it’ll be putting the Echo in all 4,748 of its hotel rooms by this coming summer. Alexa will let guests control room lights, room temperature, drapery, and the television using voice commands. “She becomes our butler, at the service of each of our guests,” said CEO Steve Wynn. “I have never, ever seen anything that was more intuitively dead on to making a guest experience seamlessly delicious, effortlessly convenient than the ability to talk to your room.”

However, Alexa’s full array of skills won’t be available to guests. At least not at the beginning phase of this rollout. The Wynn’s press release says that “as the project evolves, future features such as personal assistant functions will be introduced.” So you can tell Alexa to turn on the TV in your room, but it seems she won’t be able to carry out other commands like playing music or using services that could be directly tied to your identity and personal accounts. No buying stuff from Amazon, either.

Perhaps that’s for the better, as having an always-on microphone in a private room might give some Wynn visitors pause. There’s something a little creepier about this than, say, putting a Roku or Apple TV in your room. The hotel doesn’t mention any security precautions it plans to take for the Echo, like automatically wiping the device’s history between guests. As a refresher on exactly when Alexa is listening to or recording your voice, here’s what the company’s FAQ page says:

When these devices detect the wake word, they stream audio to the cloud, including a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word.

Amazon’s Alexa app does have a history section where users can review past commands to the device. It’s not clear whether guests will have access to that, but it’s certainly possible that hotel employees might. You can disable the Echo’s microphone by hitting a button on the top of the speaker. There’s also always the option of unplugging it — if controlling the curtains or lights with your voice isn’t quite cool enough to counter your eavesdropping fears.