Alexa Is About To Invade One US College Campus

It seems that even Alexa is participating in the back to school rush this year. Today, Saint Louis University announced that it will outfit "every student residence hall room and student apartment on campus" with an Alexa device. All told, that means SLU is outfitting student living spaces with around 2,300 Echo Dots.

SLU said in an announcement today that all of these Echo Dots will be up and running by the time classes start later this month. Obviously, students will be able to use their Echo Dot to do things like order pizza and stream music – though SLU says in a separate FAQ that university devices will only be able to stream through iHeartRadio and TuneIn at first.

The part where this whole thing ties into the university directly comes in the form of the SLU skill. Each Echo Dot at SLU will support that skill, and it'll launch supporting more than 100 questions that are specific to the university. Students can use the skill to get directions to specific buildings on campus, find out when certain locations close, or learn about events that are happening at the school.

SLU's Echo Dots will be based on Alexa for Business, and in that FAQ we mentioned above, the school attempts to allay privacy concerns by stating that individual devices won't be tied to any student accounts. The university also says that it won't be keeping recordings of questions asked to SLU-owned Echo devices. Of course, if you still don't trust the IoT device in your dorm room, you can always unplug it and store it until the end of the school year.

It's interesting to see a university adopt Alexa on such a wide scale, but the big question now is whether or not students will actually use those devices regularly. If the SLU skill offers easy access to a lot of information about campus, it's possible that this roll out could be a hit – especially with how complicated university websites can sometimes be. We'll see how this launch goes later this month, but for now, head down to the comments section and let us know what you think of this announcement.