When unexplained delays pushed Apple’s smart speaker back from a 2017 debut, Apple said it needed “a little more time before it’s ready” and promised an “early 2018" release. Now it seems Apple is making good on its revised launch window, as the HomePod will officially go on sale on February 9th.
My smartphone is a sassy Australian woman, and my alarm clock is a nice American woman. When I turn on a new Windows laptop another cheery woman asks me if I’d like to set up Cortana. When I drive, it’s yet another woman that tells me to turn left. And when I’m cooking in the kitchen, Alexa’s sunshine-filled female…
Despite its best efforts, Microsoft’s Groove Music service never really caught on. So back in October, Microsoft shut the service down and told its users to switch to Spotify. Unfortunately, that decision had some unintended consequences for Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana, which relied on Groove Music’s library…
If you were one of the twelve people passionately awaiting the integration of Cortana with Alexa and vice versa, then I have some news for you. Both Amazon and Microsoft have missed the key “later this year” deadline announced back in August 2017.
The smartphone made the standalone alarm clock worthless. Sure you probably know some alarm clock holdouts (a parent or grandmother perhaps), but you probably just use your phone, which is already resting on the nightstand and has a decent enough alarm. The $130 Amazon Echo Spot, a new, tiny, Alexa device with a…
Yesterday, a report from Bloomberg came out saying that Samsung will launch a Bixby-powered smart speaker sometime in the first half of 2018. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone since DJ Koh already told CNBC back in August that the company was indeed trying to put its digital assistant, which first…
Google Assistant is keen on taking as big a role in your life as possible, and to that end Google keeps pouring new features into the app, whether it’s on your phone, your dinky smart speaker, your Pixelbook, or your Nvidia Shield. Here are 7 capabilities that the Assistant has been given that you might not have made…
It might not feel like it, but it’s been almost three years since the original Amazon Echo hit the scene. In the time since, the number of Alexa-powered devices has grown from a single smart speaker into an entire family including the Dot, the Look, and the Show—not to mention all the third-party devices out there.…
As Google and Apple (and Samsung) scramble to build the smartest, do-anything personal assistant for your phone, Amazon and Microsoft have elected to take a different route: They’re working together rather than competing. The news arrived in the form of a joint announcement from both companies, and the New York Times is reporting
Look, you give me a robot—even one that exists merely as a screen, speaker, camera, and microphone—and my first order of business is going to be screwing with it: trying to elicit the most explicit response I can. But Alexa, as found in the Echo and new Echo Show, is not prone to being explicit.
The first night the Amazon Echo Show was in my bedroom I had to carefully lay it face down on my nightstand. The display, which was cycling through my upcoming meetings, most recent news, and the weather, was simply too bright. It was like having a little super informative sun shining in my face. The second night, as…
Digital assistant apps of all kinds are on the rise, but you don’t necessarily need to invest in a smart speaker to start chatting to one: with a little know-how you can get Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant up and running on your computer. Here’s what you need to do.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 is one of the prettiest phones you can buy right now, but it launched as a somewhat incomplete product. Bixby, the phone’s new digital assistant, doesn’t yet have one if its key features—voice recognition. This shortcoming wouldn’t be so obvious if only Samsung hadn’t included a new button on the…
Google Home might not be the most popular voice assistant to offer convenient information in exchange for reams of personal data, but it appears to be the first to serve ads directly into users’ living rooms.
Good news for anyone with an Android phone that isn’t a Pixel: Google Assistant is rolling out to more phones, new and old. That means many more of us will be able to take advantage of Google’s latest and smartest AI. There are some things both the Google Assistant and Siri are excellent at—like pulling up emails or…
Google Assistant is not intuitive. Gizmodo reporter Michael Nunez found that out the hard way when he tried to arrange a romantic date with it. I had less lofty goals when I played around with Google Assistant. I just wanted to see how well it stacked up to Apple’s Siri. While Google’s AI bot is extraordinary in some…
There are so many AI-powered digital assistants out there these days, we’ll forgive you if you’ve lost track. Hound is an offering from Shazam rival SoundHound, and it’s packed with an impressive number of features considering it doesn’t have the weight of Apple or Google’s engineering teams behind it. Here are five…
Siri making a meal of your boyfriend’s name? Or is it just not getting the right amount of twang in when trying to say the name of the local cab firm? If you think Siri’s pronunciation skills leave something to be desired then you can retrain the app yourself in just a few minutes—here’s how to go about it.
Google Now is partly a portal to the main Google search engine, so you can ask the digital assistant anything that you would query Google for: the height of the Eiffel Tower, what six inches is in centimeters or even what’s on your agenda. But the app also integrates with specific features on your phone—here are 9…
Every mobile operating system comes with its own digital assistant. iOS has Siri, Android has Google Now, and Windows phone has Cortana. But now, Microsoft is giving all smartphone users some choice, now that Cortana has escaped (the sinking ship that is) the Windows phone and officially migrated to Android, iOS and…
