Brief:

• St. Louis University (SLU) will issue an Amazon Echo Dot to every student dorm room and apartment on campus by the start of classes this month, the university announced. The 2,300 voice-enabled devices on campus will come with preinstalled skills to provide answers to more than 100 questions about the college, such as "What time does the library close tonight?" and "Where is the registrar's office?"
• The Alexa digital assistant, which powers the Echo devices, will also provide information about athletic games, concerts and campus events, among other postings. David Hakanson, SLU's vice president and CIO, said the Echo Dot deployment will help students needing practical information and free up time to focus on their studies.
• SLU conducted a pilot program with Alexa-enabled devices in dorm rooms last spring and saw a positive response from students. The university's customized skill was created by n-Powered, a voice skill development firm, and is hosted on the e-commerce giant's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services.

Insight:

SLU's adoption of Alexa could drum up major awareness for the digital assistant among the next generation of consumers, something companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have previously accomplished with discount programs and giveaways for students. The institution's adoption of the technology also follows a trend of other institutions like Georgia Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and Arizona State University also putting the assistant in dorm rooms for students.

The campus-wide usage may help to pave the way for greater familiarity with the Amazon-powered tech, potentially boosting adoption among the young adults who will be entering the workforce in a few years. To contend with potential privacy concerns by students or their parents, SLU notes that the devices are operated by a central system and are not tied to any student's individual account, meaning it won't retain personal information.

While SLU appears to be the first university to bring Alexa-enabled devices to every on-campus student, other schools have experimented with a similar strategy. The Georgia Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and Arizona State University provided some students with Echo Dots during the 2017-2018 academic year in order to research the benefits of virtual personal assistants for students.