News came out earlier this week that the Wynn in Las Vegas will furnish over 4,700 rooms with Amazon Echos. That’s a big investment — at least half a million dollars plus likely several hundred thousand in implementation costs — but one that will vault Wynn as a leader in voice in hospitality.

There are some questions about how this will be implemented. If Wynn has to install the Echos like a normal consumer would, then it’ll be a tedious process of creating an Amazon account for each room, changing settings, integrating the Crestron (or Creston-like) control systems, music services, etc. That’s maybe 20–30 minutes per room or about 1 person-year.

It’s probably not going to happen that way. It’s likely that because of the volume of Echos, Wynn will be able to work with Amazon to put together a provisioning protocol so that the Echos can be setup en masse and reduce the setup time to just plugging in and running through a 10 minute or less test (1 minute for setup, 1 minute to test connection to network, 2 minutes to run through voice tests, 1 minute for music, 2 minutes for controlling devices, etc). The development of a provisioning protocol might pave the way for large scale deployment of Echos or AVS-enabled devices in other venues such as offices and the development of enterprise AVS applications.