The Yale lock company dates back to 1868, but that doesn’t mean it’s only about that heavy padlock grandpa had on his shed. These days, it even makes smart locks for your smart home system. The Yale Smart Cabinet Lock, for example, integrates with HomeKit to protect your indoor valuables.
Apple quietly introduced a new app to the App Store earlier this month. It’s called Siri Speech Study. It allows participants — by invitation from Apple — to opt in and share voice requests and other data to help improve the voice-activated digital assistant’s performance.
The rollout of Matter, the standard expected to help smart-home systems like Apple HomeKit, Google Nest and Amazon Alexa Smart Home use devices in common, is delayed again.
This home automation post is brought to you by SwitchBot.
These days, people control more and more aspects of their lives remotely through apps. And it’s no longer just “smart” devices like wired doorbells, thermostats and lights. Even your not-so-smart devices can join the party.
Now, with SwitchBot products, you can control many of your ordinary, old-fashioned appliances and use them with home-automation systems like Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
And even better, right now you can try SwitchBot for just a buck by joining the One Dollar Club.
SwitchBot makes about a dozen products. Today we’ll focus on two, the SwitchBot Bot smart switch and the SwitchBot Hub Mini smart remote. They can be used separately or together.
Shad Ahmad was a hard-studying freshman majoring in biology and minoring in history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
Going home to continue classes for a semester remotely from his parents’ house in Wisconsin may not have been ideal, but Ahmad found a comforting upside. Integrated smart technology makes his life easier, he told Cult of Mac.
If you’re limited on space, you know the special value of multitasking furniture and organizers. Whether it’s a standing desk you can easily convert, cord organizers to keep cable clutter at bay, or other helpful space-saving goods, it certainly helps to decorate your pad with stuff that performs more than one function.
This C by GE Sol WiFi Alexa Enabled Smart Light doesn’t just brighten your space with a modern glow. It also fully connects to Amazon Alexa to give you better control of your living space.
A HomeKit-compatible smart plug is an easy way to try home automation. And the Meross Smart WiFi Plug Mini is an especially inexpensive option. It enables a lamp or other simple electrical device to be remotely controlled from an iPhone using Siri voice commands.
Thanks to Amazon’s Echo devices, Alexa is probably the AI assistant most likely to come up in a conversation. But Siri is still the most popular virtual assistant of them all.
According to a new report by Futuresource Consulting, Siri currently leads the virtual assistant pack with a 35% global marketshare. Google Assistant follows behind with 9% of the marketshare, while Alexa makes up just 4% of AI assistants.
Sonos is about to add a new weapon to its smart speakers that will help make it even more competitive against Apple’s HomePod.
The company revealed today that it plans to bring Google Assistant to its smart speakers later this year. Beta testing for the new feature has already begun, allowing Google’s Siri-competitor to be the main voice input on some Sonos speaker models.
Compared to the lawless wilderness that is certain other app stores, Apple’s App Store is a well-regulated place, free from dodgy fake apps masquerading as the real thing.
Clearly someone in Cupertino got a little too merry with the egg nog recently, however, since a phony version of the Amazon Alexa app was recently granted permission to enter the App Store. It even managed to hit the #6 spot in the App Store’s utilities section over the holidays.
