For years the multi-room audio market was owned by Sonos. Amazon chipped away at that a bit by giving their Echo speakers multi-room functionality. Sonos responded by adding Alexa to their speakers. Well, things are changing, and Harman Kardon’s new Citation line of speakers is ready to give both a run for their money; the entry-level Citation ONE is superb.
My home is filled with Amazon Echo devices but, as Judie and Carly reported, it was Google Assistant rather than Alexa that was on display at CES 2019. If the amazing JBL LINK VIEW I have been reviewing is any indication, there’s a good reason why. It is a fantastic device and Google Assistant is remarkably powerful.
Anker has just introduced the Roav Bolt, yet another of their cleverly crafted mobile accessories. The Roav Bolt is essentially a multipurpose car charger that is designed to bring Google’s Voice Assistant directly to your car, so you’ll no longer have to say “Hey Google” to your smartphone while driving.
Speakers and headphones with integrated smart assistants have become all the rage. The House of Marley is jumping into the fray but are doing so with a twist. Some of their new speakers and headphones leverage services like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant and do so using sustainable materials. Smart and socially responsible is a nice way to go!
Simplehuman is one of those companies whose products are simple in appearance and form factor, but the practical uses of their items will make you want to take a look in the mirror and say “why don’t I have this?” And speaking of mirrors, they have two new ones.
Partnering with the Funai Corporation, Philips has just announced their first 4k UDH Android TV with two different series and five different display sizes; you’ll certainly want to check out.
We’ve seen an explosion in the number of smart home products currently available. Some are standalone units. Others have speakers and/or touch screens. The iHome iGV1 falls somewhere in the middle. It’s a smart speaker with Google Assistant and a digital clock built-in. It’s great if you want to replace your beside clock with something a bit more powerful.
If you’ve read my previous review about the NVIDIA SHIELD, then you know how much I love it. The ability to watch YouTube, DirecTV Now, HBO, Netflix, as well as play games, makes it a must-have device not just in my home but also when I travel.
If you like the idea of having a smart assistant in your home — a device with an integrated speaker that can answer questions, play audio, and control your smarthome products — but you’d like an assistant that can do just a bit more, then the Lenovo Smart Display might be the perfect device for you.
A few weeks ago, a Google rep called my wife’s business to talk about how Google Suite could help her with her business. As part of the experiment, they wanted to ship her a free Google Home.
I have an office with two windows on our house’s south side; these windows take in brutal amounts of Texas sun and heat during the spring and summer. Lutron Serena Shades are custom-made window shades that can be controlled by a remote, by your smartphone, or with an AI assistant. What you end up with are smarthome-worthy window coverings.
At an event celebrating the company’s 2018 audio lineup in New York last week, LG was showing off a somewhat surprising newcomer – their first ever Google Smart Display, the LG ThinQ WK9 Google Smart Display.
I’ve had a couple Amazon Echo Dots for about a year now. I thought they were great. Then this past Christmas, I picked up a couple Google Home Minis just because I wanted to check them out. Now Amazon’s Echo Dot has been pushed to a backup system as I think the Google Home system is so much better.
It’s a natural progression for the smart speaker market to go from speakers alone to adding screens. Mobile assistants are becoming an everyday part of our workflow, and being able to move from query to visual aid quickly, or from voice request to tv show, adds a whole new level of value.
A good pair of headphones is hard to find, but if you’re tired of searching, then you might want to check out JBL’s recently updated Everest series. Sporting three different models, the JBL Everest collection (710GA, 310GA, and 110GA) are made with different wearers in mind, depending on if you like around ear, on-ear, and in-ear.
For those of you who don’t remember “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”, one of the running gags involved a “secret word”. Basically, if anyone said the “secret word” everyone was supposed to scream. I would suggest playing that with CES 2018 and “digital assistant“, but we’d all lose our voices and our hearing within an hour.
It was only a month ago that Qualcomm held their annual Tech summit, yet Qualcomm still had a lot of announcements to make at CES today.
For all my grumbling about switching from Android to iOS, it’s really not so bad. The one thing I really missed was Google Assistant, but the JBL Link 20 is doing an excellent job of filling that gap. It’s a portable Bluetooth and WiFi speaker with Google Assistant built-in, so I can take my “Hey, Google” obsession all over the house!
Google has their sights set on taking on Alexa this holiday season, and they have teamed up with JBL to produce three Google Assistant enabled speakers in the form of the JBL LINK 10, 20 and 300. All three of these speakers lets you interact with Google Assistant, so you can tell the speakers do things like play tracks on Spotify, set reminders, ask about the weather, or what’s on your calendar schedule that day. Of the three speakers, the JBL LINK 10 is the smallest and the most portable with a 5 hour battery life. The JBL 20 is…
After years insisting their system be as closed as possible with regard to everything but the streaming music services with which it has partnered, Sonos has finally moved into the “smart speaker” space. With the launch of the Sonos One, Amazon Alexa will be available out of the box with support for Google Assistant sometime in 2018.
If you’ve got an Amazon Alexa or Google Home device, then you’ve already found out that while intelligent speakers are okay, they usually aren’t that great to look at nor do they sound as amazing as one might hope.