The world is slowly going to all f*ck.
Alexa is being built into new homes. Your cars weren’t enough.
VALLEJO, Calif. — The nation’s largest home builder is betting voice-activated digital assistants and smart devices will become as expected in a new home as garages now are.
Lennar announced Wednesday that standard features in its new homes will include built-in Wi-Fi, smart locks, doorbells, thermostats and lights — all controlled by Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated digital assistant.
Each house will come with two Alexa-enabled smart speakers, an Echo Show and an Echo Dot. New homeowners will also get a free visit from an Amazon technician to help set everything up and teach them how to use it.
“This will be the hallmark of why we buy a new home,” said David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Ventures. “It’s an important step in the mass adoption of all these technologies.”
No other major builder has folded this still-evolving technology into all its homes. The announcement marks a major play to get what is still something of a cool, but not vital, technology into a broad swath of American homes.
It comes as Amazon, Google and Apple fight for market share in the smart speaker category. In 2018, about 18% of Americans will use a smart speaker at least once a month, digital marketing firm eMarketer found. Amazon holds 66.6% of the market and Google 29.5%. And it’s a bet that homeowners will find the convenience of a ready-made smart home outweighs any misgivings they have about giving one tech company even more information about their daily habits.
www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/05/09/amazons-alexa-built-into-all-new-homes-lennar/584004002/