Amazon Introduces Smart-Home ‘Experience Centers’

Amazon has announced the opening of interactive Amazon Experience Centers within select Lennar model homes across the United States. In these Alexa-enabled smart homes, customers can ask Alexa to control the television, lights, thermostat, shades, and more.

The model homes showcase how customers can use Alexa in their everyday lives. According to the retail giant, customers can experience how easy it can be to reorder household essentials using the Amazon Dash Button, listen or watch Prime content with Fire TV, or schedule on-demand home services through Amazon Home Services. 

“We are excited to extend our relationship with Lennar with the launch of Amazon Experience Centers. As one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, Lennar offers the potential to enable this experience within easy driving distance of millions of customers. “We wanted customers to experience a real home environment that showcases the convenience of the Alexa smart home experience, great entertainment available with Prime, and Home Services,” says Nish Lathia, general manager, Amazon Services.

In a real home setting, customers can experience how Alexa, Prime, and Amazon services come together.

Using Alexa in the experience centers, customers can adjust the thermostat, see who’s at the front door without leaving the couch, and try routines such as “Alexa, good morning” to have Alexa turn on lights, read the weather, and provide an update on commute times based on traffic.

“We picked Amazon because of our shared commitment to customers, their Amazon experts across the country, and their ability to connect customers with thousands of service providers through Amazon Home Services.”

— David Kaiserman, Lennar

Customers can also experience Amazon Prime using voice control with access to more than two million songs on Prime Music along with Prime Original movies and series.

The Experience Centers are set up by “Amazon experts,” who plan to update and refine the experience within each model home. The experts are Amazon employees who are specially trained on the latest technology, says the company.

If customers are impressed, they can bring the experience to their existing homes by booking a one-on-one session with an Amazon employee.

“Amazon’s ability to bring a home to life with Alexa smart home experiences, entertainment, and services — coupled with their obsession with customer experience — is a natural extension of our Everything’s Included approach to homebuilding,” says David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Ventures.

“We picked Amazon because of our shared commitment to customers, their Amazon experts across the country, and their ability to connect customers with thousands of service providers through Amazon Home Services.”

Amazon Experience Centers are now open in Lennar model homes in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC with more coming soon.

The post Amazon Introduces Smart-Home ‘Experience Centers’ appeared first on Electronic House.

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Polk Taps Google Assistant for First Smart Speaker

Polk Audio has entered the smart speaker race with a compact Google-powered speaker that supports voice control and wireless audio streaming.

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Monoprice Monolith 12" and 15" THX Ultra Subwoofers Review

Monolith 15"
Performance
Features
Build Quality
Value

Monolith 12"
Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value

PRICE $800, $1,300

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Clean, copious, and articulate bass
Outstanding build quality
Five-year replacement warranty
Minus
No parametric equalizer
No app control
Extremely heavy

THE VERDICT
Entry into the crowded internet-direct subwoofer market is a bold move from Monoprice, but the performance of these subs will surely make some waves and breed some fierce competition.

Reproducing a movie soundtrack in a home environment isn’t an easy task. At your local cinema, the theater will hopefully have sound dampening so you don’t hear outside noise. And if you’re lucky, the system will be calibrated properly and provide enough headroom so there’s no clipping or distortion during the dynamic portions of the soundtrack.

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Dali Ships BluOS-Enabled Wireless Speaker

Danish speaker maker Dali today announced the availability of its Callisto wireless speaker system, the latest product to embrace the proprietary BluOS wireless streaming platform developed by Canada’s Lenbrook, parent company of the iconic audio brands NAD and PSB Speakers and Bluesound.

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Sonus faber Announces Sonetto Collection

Italian speaker maker Sonus faber today announced the Sonetto collection, an eight-model speaker series slated to hit U.S. stores in late August.

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Savant and USAI Lighting Bring Easy Control to Innovative LED Light Fixtures

After a trip to the International Lightfair in Chicago yesterday, one thing is clear. Light fixtures have grown extremely sophisticated in their design and capabilities. The days of standard dimmable fixtures are gone. Today, it’s all about tunable white light and colored LED lighting engineered to promote health and wellness, evoke ambiance, and even put our circadian rhythms back on track. As evident from its dynamic display at Lightfair, USAI Lighting along with new partner Savant are ready to take home lighting to the next level.

 

The Missing Link of Home Lighting

The technology behind color-changing and tunable white features is immensely more sophisticated than standard dimming capabilities that most homeowners are familiar, which can complicate the process of integrating these super smart, highly functional, and beautiful new light fixtures into a smart home ecosystem. Finding a way to easily alter the color temperature (Kelvin) of white lights or the WRGB color of fixtures to emulate a sunny day or lift your mood, for example, has become the “missing link” in today’s world of modern, state-of-the-art home lighting.

As a spokesperson at the USAI booth at Lightfair put it, “Lighting fixture manufacturers were busy developing new technology on one island, and home systems manufacturers were developing technologies on another island; the two never intersected, leaving a void between sophisticated fixture and simple control.”

 

Savant CEO Robert Madonna adds, “Fixtures are such an important part of a house, to do it right, you need the right combination of control and lighting. What you can do with fixtures these days has introduced consumers to a whole new world of home lighting.”

 

Bridging the Gap Between Fixtures and Control

Intending to bridge the gap between this new generation of smart fixtures and simple control is Savant and USAI. The two companies have joined forces to develop cohesiveness between USAI’s extensive line of innovative LED solutions and Savant’s well-established, intuitive control systems. Home systems integrators will now be able to provide homeowners with colored and tunable white light fixtures for their house along with a seamlessly integrated control system.

 

To demonstrate what’s possible through this partnership, at the USAI exhibit at Lightfair a specially curated Savant TruImage system adjusted the lighting color and temperature at the touch of a button to emulate a variety of conditions. The lighting scenes featured were chosen based on significant research by USA Lighting to include: circadian, soft day, soft night, energize, sunlight, and relax. Tunable white settings included warm, sunrise, natural and early A.M.

 

Scene Control on Steroids—Use Your Voice to Set the Lights

 

In addition to the Lightfair demo tablet running Savant’s TruImage platform, users can change dimming levels, kelvin temperatures and WRGB colors also from their phone, Savant touch screens and Pro Remote as well as Savant Scene access via voice command. Savant and USAI Lighting will be utilizing Savant’s scene engine and USAI Lighting’s color research to serve up pre-defined light color and scene content that can be implemented as is or easily adjusted based on personal preference and project design.

 

“The combination of Savant and USA Lighting’s advanced controls and lighting technology provides an intuitive way for homeowners to experience the power of personalized lighting—light that is as dynamic and ever-changing as we are,” said Bonnie Littman, President and CEO of USAI Lighting. “For the first time ever, homeowners can curate their lighting for any activity, whether it’s for better living, working or playing, and we are thrilled to partner with Savant, bringing this experience to the market in a high-quality and meaningful way.”

The post Savant and USAI Lighting Bring Easy Control to Innovative LED Light Fixtures appeared first on Electronic House.

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Hands On: YouTube Red Premium Service

Despite the good reviews of the Karate Kid follow up series for YouTube Red, the rest of Red's original content isn't up to the same standard. Still, it may be worth the premium subscription for music fans.

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