The Matter connectivity standard helps different devices and smart-home platforms like Apple HomeKit and Amazon Alexa work together. And with an update Monday, it added nine home-appliance types and got other improvements, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) behind it said.
Matter specification 2.1 adds support for refrigerators, dishwashers, laundry washers, robot vacuums, air-quality sensors, air purifiers, fans, stand-alone room air conditioners, and smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms.
Apple plans to produce an updated version of the HomePod as soon as the fourth quarter of 2022 or the first quarter of 2023, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Friday.
As reliable as Kuo can be, little other information exists beyond speculation. But that’s part of the fun.
A lot of folks are jonesing for an Apple smart speaker that goes beyond the HomePod mini. The original HomePod, while much more expensive, earned a great reputation for sound quality before Apple killed it in 2021. So naturally, Apple fans are interested in a successor, possibly with new features.
Smart speaker maker Sonos will soon deploy its own voice assistant, similar to Apple’s Siri. It will let you play and control music on the company’s products, according to a new report.
The new voice assistant, “Sonos Voice,” will work with Apple Music and a handful of other services.
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.
ConnectSense, a company known for its HomeKit-friendly smart plug, has launched its next-generation device, the Smart Outlet2.
The outlet packs two Wi-Fi connected sockets that can be controlled individually via Apple’s Home app or the ConnectSense app.
If you’ve read about technology in the last five years, you’ve heard about the internet of things. It represents a merging of the physical and digital worlds, where devices of all kinds are network-enhanced.
That futuristic world is already here, and we rounded up some of our best deals on IoT-ready gear so you can embrace it fully. You’ll find great buys on an Alexa-enabled smart clock, an app-connected outlet, a mini vacuum droid and more.
Entrepreneurs are tripping over themselves to make “smart” versions of every product we already own. As such, it was only going to be so long before someone made a smart scent dispenser. That product is called Moodo. It’s a smart home fragrance box that lets you control how your home smells from your iPhone. Or your smart speaker.
But does it smell like a winner, or is this one gadget we’re turning our nose up at?
If Siri seems to be of greater service to you lately, an annual IQ test comparing virtual assistants shows its definitely getting smarter.
Loup Ventures annually peppers the various digital assistants with five categories of questions and when it comes to accuracy and comprehension of a user’s question, Google Assistant remains the best. Siri, however, is right behind Google while Amazon’s Alex and Cortana lags behind in that order.
Sonos is opening its speakers to a new world of listening experiences today with the addition of AirPlay 2.
The smart speaker company teased AirPlay 2 support last month during the introduction of its Beam speaker. Now, just over a month after Apple added AirPlay 2 as part of iOS 11.4, Sonos is the first third-party speaker company to dive head first into the new tech. And the company added a few tricks your HomePod can’t match.
Craig Federighi is no longer in charge of Siri. Responsibility for Apple’s troubled voice assistant has been given to John Giannandrea, who is now in charge of all Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts.
Siri is seen as poor competition for Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Assistant. Its weakness is hurting sales of Apple products, including the HomePod.
Most people would agree that Siri is way behind its competitors. But Apple recently made moves that indicate it’s working to improve this voice assistant.
A British survey discovered what smartspeaker owners actually use them for. This could help Apple decide what new features to add to Siri, as well as the ones that need shoring up.
In the battle of digital voice assistants, people often mock Siri for lagging behind competing products from Amazon and Google. During Monday’s WWDC 2018 keynote, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, glossed over those failings, calling Siri the “world’s most-used digital assistant.”
What he neglected to mention was the increasing frustration of Siri users expecting more from a voice assistant. From simple requests returning inaccurate results to the inability to performthat he compound actions, Siri was in desperate need of attention going into WWDC. But will the Siri upgrades in iOS 12 do the trick?
Sonos is making a power play to take over your living room with its latest smart speaker called Sonos Beam.
Beam is a new sound bar that is smaller than Sonos’ Playbar and Playbase, but it also packs some new features like a five-microphone array and it plays well with Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and of course, Siri.
Watch out HomePod, this thing looks amazing:
Apple wants to hire 142 people for Siri-related jobs, almost twice as many as this time last year. Clearly, the company is serious about turning around its troubled voice-driven digital assistant.
Siri is in trouble. Apple’s AI assistant is way behind the competition, and a new report indicates that Cupertino’s coders can’t agree on how to fix Siri — or even if it should be fixed.
Anonymous sources, supposedly from inside the Apple development team, say there’s no strong vision of what Siri should be.
Siri kind of sucks, despite its increasingly prominent role in the Apple ecosystem.
With the general verdict on the HomePod being “great speaker, shame about Siri,” what does Apple need to do in order to catch up with its rivals? Here are six Siri improvements we’d love to see Apple implement as soon as possible.
