| | October 20188CIOReviewBy Frank Wolfe, CAE, CEO, Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP®)TECHNOLOGY IS TRANSFORMING THE CASINO INDUSTRYAs a CIO, regardless of the industry you are in, you share common opportunities and potential for advancements with other CIOs when it comes to technology. These might include theft of materials, physical security of staff and customers, doing more with fewer employees and contributing to the profitability of your company. In this column, we are going to examine some hospitality technology experiments with emphasis in the casino area.The first one is biometrics, the technical term for body measurements and calculations. It has long been used as a form of identification and access control. But with the proliferation of voice recognition devices (think Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant), biometric technology has moved into guest services and the Wynn Las Vegas Casino is currently attempting to use this as a big competitive advantage.As of the writing of this column, Wynn Resorts (which includes casinos) has the largest deployment of voice recognition devices in hospitality. According to Wynn founder Steve Wynn, by adding Alexa to guest rooms it was immediately like having a "...butler at the service of each of our guests." While privacy concerns do exist, voice recognition devices are supposed to only listen when they hear a specific command. But voice recognition devices do get confused, sometimes with amusing results. You may remember when a San Diego television news broadcast covered a story about a young girl who ordered a doll house via her home's Alexa? When the news anchor reported the story, he accidentally triggered home devices to order dollhouses in the homes the story was broadcast in.At the recent Hospitality Upgrade CIO Summit, I spoke with Christian Cooper, the head of technology for Dream Hotel Group which uses Google Assistant. He said, "Voice recognition is in its infancy, but it is a platform that ultimately will pay dividends. If you are an early adapter, you do take a risk, but also get big rewards. This
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