Samsung and hotel management platform ALICE on Thursday announced a new communications service for hotel staff, having debuted it in the form of a system based on the South Korean company’s Gear S3 lineup of Tizen-powered smartwatches. The solution has been specifically designed for supporting hotel employees that work in maintenance, housekeeping, and similar departments, having been envisioned as a method of facilitating communications among any given hotel’s ranks so as to improve its operating efficiency more than intercoms, walkie-talkies, and other traditional systems would allow for.
All Gear S3 units utilized by the platform feature 4G LTE capabilities, though the Seoul-based manufacturer hasn’t clarified whether ALICE will be using the Classic model, its Frontier counterpart, or both. The system can also handle customer requests, potentially improving response times for room service, maintenance requests, or anything else guests might need, the firms said. While officially announced by the American division of the technology juggernaut, the new platform was developed by Samsung SDS, its software unit focused on business-to-business products and services.
Samsung and ALICE said they partnered after some mediation on the part of the Viceroy Hotel Group which will also be the first client to leverage their new communications product. Samsung will also be showcasing the new technology at this year’s HITEC conference which is running from June 18 through June 21 in Houston, Texas. The Gear S3 lineup is expected to be succeeded by the Gear S4 series later this year, with recent reports suggesting Samsung may announce its new wearables as early as this August. Originally introduced in late 2016, the two smartwatches are still waiting for direct follow-ups as Samsung’s 2017 efforts in the wearable space were largely focused on fitness applications, having materialized in the form of the Gear Fit2 Pro and the Gear Sport watch. It’s presently unclear whether Samsung and ALICE already found buyers for their joint solution outside of the Viceroy Hotel Group.