Smart Places = Semi-private environments

Places where people usually stay for longer time (i.e. at least a few days or sometime a complete week) are:

• Hotels, Motels, boarding houses, guest houses, lodges, rental apartments, holiday apartments and many others like that.
• Hospitals, recreation homes, and similar places were elderly and handicapped people are staying for at least some time
• Pensioners homes, old homes and similar places were elderly people are living

Thus, all these places are temporary private environments for people that live there for a few days, some weeks or even longer. In any way, it is normally not the full private environment of the users’ home but a semi-private environment.

Services at Smart Places:

These environments usually offer a number of services that people want to receive at these places where they are staying.

• For example in hotel, motels and boarding houses the business traveler wants to know when he has to check out, when he can get breakfast in the morning, where he can go in the local neighborhood in the evening to get some drinks.
• In holiday apartments there are most often some brochures available that give information about the local environment and attractions in the nearby area.
• For hospitals and similar areas the typical service providers are the nurses taking care of the patients there. Guests are calling them and tell them their needs and then the nurse tries to get the required in-formation or the requested good. This is time consuming in general and leads to delays and frustra-tions on all sides.

So there are usually services associated with these places that are consumed by persons that stay at these places.

Interactive voice services as they are provided by the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) or Google Assist can make the provision of customized services for smart places easier and more comfortable for the end user as well as for the service provider.

Consider the typical hotel environment where people check in, go to their room and usually do not ask at reception about checkout time, breakfast time etc. Usually only few people read the written information but call the front desk and ask for this information. As a lot of people do this in the evening on typical check in times, there is frustration on all sides:

• The personal at the front desk is busy with checkin and cannot take all the service calls from the rooms.
• The guest at the rooms cannot connect to the front desk as the lines are often busy.

Thus, nobody is happy about such a situation. A customized application on a SmartSpeaker that is installed in each room can be a fantastic help here. First it can provide all the services that the user also know from home, i.e. access weather forecast, read the news, play music and much more. In addition to this it can give specific information for the hotel where the guest is staying. Thus, it very easily gives information about checkout times, breakfast times, breakfast location and much more.

It can even introduce the overall hotel to the guest that just enters the rooms and gives a full overview of all services offered in the hotel. The user can via voice navigate through the overall service catalog and get a full overview of the hotel without any delays and without taking any resources from the front desk or any other service personal.