Lennar Austin is excited to unveil the new Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ Home Design at their beautiful Enclave at Estancia community. Omar L. Gallaga reports on what’s included in a Lennar Connected Home in this new article from 512tech.com.
Enjoy a photo tour of Lennar’s South Austin Connected Home
“Alexa, I’m home.”
The command, given at the entry foyer of a model home in South Austin’s Enclave at Estancia, does a few things.
Amazon’s voice-recognition technology, which is in a variety of devices in many homes, in this case is triggering a set of family room blinds to rise at the same time that multiple lights are turning on.
If a homeowner wanted, it could also trigger some relaxing welcome-home music to play, to turn on the TV or to set the right evening temperature on the home’s smart thermostats.
For Charlie Coleman, Austin division president at Lennar Corp., the nation’s largest home builder, the Alexa experience is just one part of a connected home, “everything’s Included” package that is now a standard for 200 homes being built in a 400-home community off Onion Creek Parkway.
What’s really powering the technology, Coleman says, is that the new houses Lennar is building here, along with others in its 49 Austin-area home communities and projects in 21 states, will be Wi-Fi Certified. The designation for pre-installed Wi-Fi comes from the Austin-based Wi-Fi Alliance, which typically gives its seal of certification to products such as routers and smartphones, but which now has standards for the wireless connectivity in smart homes.
That means no Wi-FI dead spots, Coleman says, no matter what devices you’re using in the home or anywhere on the property.
“We think that’s important to our customers as we engineer and design the home,” he said. “It’s no different than you would expect a builder to design heat, air conditioning and plumbing.”
Read the full article: In new South Austin development, smart homes come with a roommate: Alexa
