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.
To get the word out to home buyers, Lennar and Amazon on Wednesday will open eight model homes across the country featuring the built-in technology.
USA Today: May 30,2018
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