'Hey, Disney!' explained: Disney's twist on Alexa for home and hotels
Tech Industry
Speaker 1: The Amazon echo is getting a new voice assistant. I'm not talking about Alexa. It's a voice assistant made by Disney to do Disney things, and it's coming to Disney hotel rooms. And if you want it for your home, you have to pay extra for it. It's called Hey Disney. It's kind of wacky, but I can break it down for you.
Speaker 1: So Disney and Amazon, two giant corporations that seem to get all of my money, have now joined together [00:00:30] to make a Disney version of a voice assistant that can coexist alongside Alexa on echo devices. So the idea is that if you download this extra Disney assistant, there's gonna be two eight phrases to sum in either assistant. At any time you could say either Alexa or say, Hey, Disney and each have different voices and do different tasks, but both would be active at the same time on one echo device. This is new territory to have two assistants at once on an echo. It's a first for Amazon and there [00:01:00] are different layers to how it's gonna work depending on if you're using it at home on your echo or at a Disney hotel over the next year. Sometime in 2022, Disney will be installing echo show five devices in its hotel rooms at the Wal Disney world resort in Florida.
Speaker 1: So all hotel guests will be able to use, Hey, Disney in their rooms. Anyone with an echo at home will also be able to try it out. In fact, if a Disney assistant isn't enough Disney for you at home, [00:01:30] there is a $25 stand that puts Mickey mouse ears on the echo show five, but about that, Hey Disney assistant voice. It's not gonna come free. It'll be available for purchase to download from the Alexa the skill store sometime next year, Disney, isn't saying the price yet. So why would you pay for a Disney assistant? Let's get into all the things it does. Hey, Disney is a male voice. It is being referred to as a guide, the Disney magical companion, and it's got its own personality. [00:02:00] So it's not gonna answer things the same way Alexa mite, and it could comes with a bunch of different entertainment.
Speaker 1: There's jokes, trivia sounds, games and stories. It's featuring characters from not just the Disney animated movies, but also Pixar Marvel and star wars. So the idea here is not that you're using Hey Disney to do normal Alexa things like turn off the lights or Hey Disney put toy toilet paper in my shopping cart. Nah, this is, uh, about having fun with entertainment and kids could have fun [00:02:30] interacting with some Disney character voices. For example, there are interactive games that feature Mickey mouse and Dory from finding Nemo and Ola from frozen. You could also get a personalized greeting from a Disney character. If you have an echo device with a screen, you're gonna see custom animations and little visual goodies to match the audio. They will be sing alongs, bedtime stories. There's also something called sound scapes. This could be neat. You can listen to sounds from an environment [00:03:00] that's inspired from a film or even from a theme park.
Speaker 1: So what if you wanted to hear the sound of the ocean waves on Moana's beach, or maybe you wanna hear the sounds of the birds chirping at snow whites forest cottage? Well, maybe that's possible. I don't know what it's gonna offer, but we have seen Disney do similar things on Disney plus there is something called Zen animation. You can also listen to the crackling of a Yug at, out in Dale, or you can play three hours of water sounds [00:03:30] as Dory and Nemo swim around in Dory's reef camp soundscapes of the Disney parks have me thinking it would be pretty cool. Maybe a little therapeutic. I mean, I am a Disney nerd, so maybe I'm weird for thinking that that's therapeutic, but hear me out. What if they had the sound of the horses troting on the cobblestone and the trolleys ringing at magic kingdoms main street with the steam train pulling up nearby, or maybe just the sound of hundreds of strollers rolling by [00:04:00] with cranky children, whining about their desires for Mickey headed ice cream sticks.
Speaker 1: It could really transport you all right. I joke. But the Hey Disney is about giving you access to unique content to get you in the Disney mood or just entertain the kids with being able to interact with characters. The assistant also has a way of doing some normal tasks like you can use, Hey D is to set a timer or an alarm, and you can ask, Hey, Disney to check the weather or the time. And you probably get an answer in a Disney sort of way. Ah, but you [00:04:30] must be wondering if Disney has an Amazon voice. That must mean you can buy things. Nope. Disney says this is not support making purchases. Alexa is still will be handling that stuff I've been told. There are Easter eggs and little quirky moments. You may discover depending on what you ask, Hey Disney. So we wanna know everything that's hidden until it lands next year, but with how much Disney content there is, I'm sure there is loads of things. You can ask it like, Hey Disney, how do you get to Neverland? [00:05:00] Or Hey Disney, what's the recipe for rat or Hey Disney, who shot first? We want answers.
Speaker 1: Now let's get into the hotel rooms because using, Hey Disney at the resort has some extra magic. You might say it could help with hotel stuff, or like you can ask it to have someone bring you more towels to your room. Or if you forgot your toothbrush, it's gonna help with that normal complimentary stuff. And [00:05:30] it's also gonna help with other vacation related questions that you may need to know when you're in your room. Things like when's the next bus to Epcot. Where can I get good Italian food? When is the three o'clock parade like that? As I mentioned at the top, the resort rooms are getting echo show five devices. And there are over 30,000 hotel rooms at Walt Disney world. So that's a lot of Amazon everywhere, but it will be a modified version of the echo for privacy, the camera and the calling features are gonna be off.
Speaker 1: And [00:06:00] there's no logging in with your personal Amazon account. It's really just for, Hey Disney, the Alexa voice does work. It's gonna be in the device. She's just a little more limited. You can use Alexa to do things like hear the news or play music. And when you enter the room, smart speakers are inactive and muted. You have to opt in to enable the speaker. Oh, and here's an important point. The hotel version, it's not supporting purchases. You can't buy stuff on it because can you imagine [00:06:30] if you let kids get ahold of that, you're gonna get pizza and candy baskets delivered to your hotel room. Like some sort of home loan, two fantasy. And I at me for parents now Disney says the echo in their hotel rooms is not gonna have smart home controls. So it's not for controlling the lights or turning on your TV or setting the temperature, at least not now, but who's to say they couldn't make future hotels more smart and control more things with your voice through all this.
Speaker 1: I just keep wondering what about that star wars hotel, the gala gala star [00:07:00] cruiser. It's not open yet, but this whole thing has me thinking about what is the next step that Disney's gonna take to expand voice tech, to make, make believe more fun. Disney is not the first to put Amazon echoes in hotel rooms. Disney is just joining in on a program that's been out. So is 2018. It's called Alexa for hospitality and it lets hotels peek and choose what they want. The assisted to control and voice recordings are not saved for guest privacy. Maybe you've come across it already [00:07:30] at a Marriot hotel earlier this year, the Lego land resort in Florida put echo dots inside their pirate island hotel and guests use voice to play a Lego land themed radio station, or get a pirate narrated bedtime story or pirate jokes, or start an in room treasure hunt.
Speaker 1: The echo dots have a little note that says a ho Mey I'm Alexa, but Disney of course does everything in its own way, which is why it made a separate hay Disney experience. And you may see other companies through this soon, Amazon has [00:08:00] a new program called Alexa custom assistant, and it lets companies make their own assistance tailored to a brand personality or special customer need. But behind the scenes, the voice recognition and the AI tech, it's all from Amazon. Some automakers have been looking into using this. So when you get in your car, you can have special voice control that are just tailored to commands for your particular vehicle on top of the normal Alexa voice commands, but Disney is the first to make its own assistant. So maybe as the years go [00:08:30] on, we're gonna be talking to a few branded assistants on Amazon devices, but we're only at the real early stages here.
Speaker 1: So how does this help Disney now to have all this te in the room? Well, for the hotel, at least the backend work is gonna be smoother. When you have Alexa handling the automation of letting the team know who needs more towels and who needs baggage help compared to having someone man, the phone lines for requests and now guests don't have to pick up the phone. So that's also a plus for saving time Disney could in the future [00:09:00] add more features to this assistant. It all just depends on how guests respond. So what are your first thoughts about a Disney voice assistant at home and at hotels? Would you use it? What would you want it to do? Or what would you want it to sound like? And if it's at home, I wonder how much folks are willing to pay for it. Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
