Amazon Experience Center brings pre-wired, voice-activated smart homes to Vallejo
Lennar and Amazon have teamed up and recently announced the opening of interactive Amazon Experience Centers within select Lennar model homes across the United States, including the Tovero Community. Now customers in the area can experience first-hand the convenience of Alexa smart home experience and more in a real home environment. Learn more about Lennar’s connected homes and the future of smart home technology in this recent The Mercury News article by Rex Crum.
VALLEJO — From the outside, homebuilder Lennar’s model home in Vallejo could be any other house in a new suburban development. But that’s where the similarities end and the future begins, courtesy of a new smart-home partnership with Amazon.
This week, Amazon and Lennar began showing off what they are calling the Amazon Experience Center, a pre-wired, voice-activated smart home at a North Bay Lennar housing development, along with similar model homes in seven other locations across the country.
Lennar — one of the nation’s largest homebuilders — plans to build Amazon’s Alexa voice-assistant technology into the design when constructing all of its houses nationwide from now on. Because of the partnership with Amazon, this technology package will come standard and will not add anything to the base cost of the home. Alexa will be able to handle many of the mundane, everyday tasks that those who buy the developer’s homes currently do on their own.
Talk to Alexa and, thanks to the Amazon Echo devices that are standard with the house, you can close your shades, find a movie to watch via Amazon Prime — and the Amazon Fire TV that comes with the home — schedule automatic orders of household goods, or order those things directly by using the Amazon Dash buttons that also come standard with the home. Finally, you can lock your doors and set your thermostat as you turn in for the night.
Technology that handles such chores isn’t new; Amazon, Google and Apple have offered voice-command assistant technology for years. But a home built from the ground up with a full suite of one company’s home-control technology takes the concept to another level. And while Alexa — or any other kind of voice-command platform — offers convenience, the Lennar-Amazon connected-home model presents a slate of questions about just how much control one company can and should have over an individual’s daily routines, habits and privacy.
“This definitely takes the ‘everything store’ to another level, delivering not just products, but nearly every service one could need in a given day,” said Gene Munster, partner with tech research firm Loup Ventures. “A wholesale upgrade to a fully smart home gives Amazon a lot of power over whoever lives there. Each incremental smart device you control with Alexa is another touch point for the Amazon brand and makes Prime a little more difficult to leave.”
During a tour of the Amazon Experience Center home in Vallejo, Tom Burrill, Lennar’s Bay Area division president, said that for some, facing such new technologies in the home “can be intimidating,” but that seeing the devices in a home setting can alleviate worries about how everything works together.
Continue reading the full article HERE.
