You can now chat with your hotel room
new york — Last Wednesday, Starwood’s tech-centric hotel brand, Aloft, unveiled its topsecret ‘Project Jetson’. Now, for the first time, hotel guests can talk to their rooms, thanks to the help of Apple’s voice-powered assistant, Siri.
“Siri, raise the temperature to 68 degrees,” or, “Siri, turn out the bathroom light,” a guest might say if they were staying at Aloft’s Boston Seaport or Santa Clara locations, where Project Jetson is currently piloting.
Depending on your outlook regarding hospitality, that may seem unnecessary or frivolous — or scarily futuristic. But maybe you’ve already learned first-hand that when most of these functions are embedded on bedside tablet devices, they quickly get buggy with age. Or maybe you’ve gotten into a tightly tucked bed after a long day of meetings, only to find that a light is still on and there’s no way to turn it off remotely. Then you know that Project Jetson isn’t just about technology for technology’s sake; it’s about making your hotel room more intuitive.
The pilot version of Project Jetson is just the foundation for what’s to come, explained Aloft’s global brand manager, Eric Marlo, who has also overseen such cutting-edge launches as Aloft’s robotic butler, Botlr, and a firstof-its-kind integration with AppleTV. “We literally launched these [Siri-powered] rooms on Wednesday and we’re already thinking about generations two and three,” he told Bloomberg.
Siri, raise the temperature to 68 degrees
Aloft hotel guest
According to Marlo, Project Jetson has yielded “the world’s first voice-activated guest rooms.” The technology is integrated with a room’s thermostat, sound system and lighting schemes and is also “tapped into local areas from a GPS perspective,” he said. In other words, you could just as easily ask Siri for local sushi recommendations as you could ask her to blast your “shower karaoke” playlist.
But wouldn’t you just want to use your cell phone to look up nearby sushi restaurants? When the question was posed, Marlo laughed; it offered the perfect transition to his expansion plans. By the time Project Jetson 2.0 deploys, he said, you’ll be able to control the entire room by speaking to your iPhone — and not just light and temperature and sound.
You could have Siri place a Refuel order, which is Aloft’s not-so-fancy term for room service. If you’re staying at a hotel staffed by a Botlr, you could even get your sandwich and Coke delivered by an R2D2 lookalike. — Bloomberg