Google’s Nest has long been one of the best ways to get started in the smart home, through its much-loved Learning Thermostat, but also through its range of cameras, the new Nest Mini speaker, and more. Recently, Google expanded the Nest smart home device family, with the new Google Nest Doorbell, and Google Nest Cam. …
Apple and Google might be mortal rivals when it comes to smartphone operating systems, but sometimes, it pays to work together. To that end, we weren’t exactly shocked to find out this week that Apple Music support is apparently in the works for Google Home devices. The option to add Apple Music as a linked …
A lot of “wireless” tech inside practically any smart device that’s currently available in stores, but there’s still one magical wireless feature that’s still not widely available. We connect wirelessly to Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Bluetooth and NFC are also wireless technologies that allow us to transmit information across short distances. And we can recharge …
If you ranked the most popular smart speaker models in the US based on the tech companies that make them, you get a list dominated almost exclusively by just two companies: Amazon and Google. That’s according to the results of a new survey of smart speaker users conducted by the firm Strategy Analytics in July …
If you buy a Google Home Mini or an Amazon Echo Dot at full retail price, you’re a sucker. The $49 Google Home Mini is a favorite to be given away with TVs or phones or a particularly large tank of gas, since Google is keen to get it into everyone’s homes and get them …
When Apple first showed off the HomePod to the world, everyone’s biggest complaint was the pricetag. At $349, Apple’s smart speaker was noticeably more expensive than anything from Google and Amazon, and it even out-priced Sonos, which made its name selling expensive wireless speakers. But not even Apple would have the, uh, “courage” to release …
Google’s smart speaker Google Home can now communicate with you en español, the computing giant announced Tuesday, which would appear to be an outgrowth of Google promising earlier this year that 22 new languages would be coming to its Assistant — which also powers Google Home — by the end of this year.
Last week, we learned a little more about the very human flaws of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant. One couple in Portland, OR, discovered that their Amazon Echoes were accidentally recording their private conversations and sending them to a friend from their contacts list. The situation worked itself out harmlessly enough, but as we pointed out, …
Amazon invented the market for smart speakers when it first launched the Echo, and unsurprisingly, it has dominated the market ever since. Even the HomePod, with the full weight of Apple’s engineering team and Jony Ive’s facial hair, couldn’t make a dent in Echo sales. But according to new sales data from Canalys, Google took …
Amazon started the current trend of voice assistants when it launched the Amazon Echo four years ago. But the first-mover advantage doesn’t last all that long in tech, and Google has been pouring its considerable artificial intelligence resources into the Google Assistant ever since then. The company just announced a raft of new features for …
