First-of-its-kind collaboration will bring the best of Alexa and Disney, Pixar, and Star Wars characters to your home and Disney Resort hotel rooms
Later this year, you’ll be able to experience the magic of Disney in a new way— both at home and in select Disney Resort hotel rooms.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, Amazon live demoed the Disney Magical Companion for the first time in public. ‘Hey Disney!’ is a first-of-its-kind voice assistant built by Disney using Amazon’s Alexa Custom Assistant (ACA). ACA is a comprehensive solution that makes it easy for Disney to create their own custom voice assistant, the Disney Magical Companion, tailored to delight fans, and that can coexist with Alexa. U.S. customers will be able to purchase the service at home in the coming months.
‘Hey Disney!’ gives customers access to a wide range of Disney magic through their Echo devices at home and at select Disney Resorts hotels, where the service is complimentary. The Disney Magical Companion features special experiences with more than 20 Disney, Pixar, and Star Wars characters like Mickey, Dory, Olaf, and more, with whom customers can interact to hear an array of jokes, play trivia, listen to soundscapes and more. Once you’ve purchased and enabled it, all you need to do say is “Hey Disney!” — a new wake word Amazon created for the experience.
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How does it work?
Customers will access the service through Echo smart speakers at home and Disney Resort hotel rooms. Guests staying in select Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resort hotels will be able to ask Hey Disney! questions about park hours, request fresh towels, and more.
Hey Disney! will also feature support for Disney’s MagicBand+, the smart, interactive wearable that visitors to Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resort already use to interact with shows, enter the park, redeem Lightning Lane access, and more. For example, MagicBand+ will enhance playing trivia, as it transforms into a “game show” style buzzer and reacts with lights and haptics when you answer trivia questions. And it will even light up and buzz when your alarm or timer goes off.
Dan Soto, VP of Technology & Digital for Disney said, “As a first-of-its-kind voice assistant, ‘Hey Disney!’ continues Disney’s long tradition of using technology to provide the coolest, most convenient experiences to make your visit better. We’re always looking for new ways to open the door to even more stories, making them richer, more immersive and forever memorable to guests and fans, whether they are at home, or visiting Disney Parks. We can’t wait for fans and families to discover all the surprising and delightful interactions we’ve built into this experience.”
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An entirely new experience
Dana Alia, a senior manager on the Alexa team, said that Disney wanted to delight their fans in a new way. “Disney was really focused on making something that brings you into their resort experience in a way that hadn’t been done before,” she said.
Erin Egan, who leads the collaboration for Amazon, said the goal to create a new, unique experience also came with challenges. “In a lot of collaborations, there’s a template. You’ve done something similar before,” she said. “In this case, we were both starting from blank. This added complexity but meant we had the freedom to define it.”
For example Amazon helped Disney create hundreds of pieces of content. If you ask “Hey Disney!” for the weather, Olaf from Frozen might tell you it’s cold out. Or if you’re in the mood to cook a nice meal, you can ask “Hey Disney!” to play the soundscape from Ratatouille.
An innovation in storytelling
Aaron Rubenson, the vice president of Alexa, said education was another important challenge since not everyone is familiar with voice AI. “One of the fun areas for innovation was imagining how we were going to teach people about the feature,” he said.
His team helped Disney build an introduction that guides fans and helps them get started with Hey Disney!. They added various hints during interactions and prompts to do things like hear jokes or play trivia to make sure customers at home and in-resort get the most of the experience.
“Disney is the master storyteller, and its stories are so powerful for so many people,” Rubenson said. “Now people can keep talking to a character, they can continue with the story line when they go back to their room at the end of the day, or when they go home after the vacation is over. It’s just gratifying to imagine that we’re a part of literally bringing that magic home.”
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