#home-kit

#home-kit

Amazon's latest upgrade to Alexa+, its next-generation AI assistant, allows you to order food from popular delivery services Uber Eats and Grubhub in a conversational manner, just as if you were chatting with a waiter at a restaurant or placing an order at a drive-thru.

The U400 one-ups just about every other smart lock available today by using your iPhone or Apple Watch's ultra wideband (UWB) signal for hands-free smart lock unlocking, a new Home Key feature Apple announced in 2024 that's coming to smart locks at long last.

OpenAI's chatbot can't control car functions. If you want to adjust the cabin temperature or skip tracks, you'll still need Siri for those tasks.

The Sassy style is built on one premise: help first, judge always. Every answer comes wrapped in wit and a well-placed roast - it'll answer your question, it'll just make you feel something about it first. Expect reality checks delivered with charm, compliments that somehow sting, and warmth you didn't see coming. Equal-opportunity irreverence, zero apologies.

Ever since OpenAI acquired ex-Apple chief designer Jony Ive's design startup, rumors have been rampant about what kind of product the collaboration will yield. Clearly, it would have to be some sort of hardware piece - a first for OpenAI. At first, insiders hinted at an AI pen, then the clues shifted things towards something simpler - AI earbuds. Now insiders familiar with the matter claim that there are three

Siminoff's vision: turn Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered "intelligent assistant" for the entire home and beyond. A handful of new features that advance that goal shipped just ahead of this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, alerts about "unusual events," conversational AI, facial recognition features, and more. Some of these additions have not been without controversy, as consumers have to grapple with how much privacy they're giving up in favor of convenience and security.

Originally developed by Nest (before the Google acquisition), Thread has existed since 2011. Devised as a power-efficient mesh networking technology for internet-of-things (IoT) products, Thread gathered pace after the 2014 formation of the Thread Group, which develops the technology and drives its adoption as an industry standard. Founding members like ARM, Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm have been joined by Apple, Amazon, and many other big companies over the years.

Using the company's SmartVoice technology, the devices react to wake-up words for verbal commands, using built-in microphones. Most of the appliances will also offer a built-in speaker so that they can react audibly to the commands. IAI Smart emphasizes the ease of use that this offers. "Our guiding principle is simple: make smart home technology easier for everyone," said Jason Jiang, CEO of IAI Smart. "Voice control should be effortless, and now it is." And because everything is on-device, personal information never leaves the home.

On the hunt for new smart plugs to upgrade your home automation? One of our favorite picks, the Meross MSS110 Smart Plug Mini, is currently marked down on Amazon. The two pack is discounted from $34 to $27, and the four pack is down to $34 from its usual price of $52. These plugs help add smart functionality to otherwise dumb devices around your home, like lamps or fans, so they can be included in your routines.

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Remember The Clapper? The plug-in staple may have made for a catchy jingle in the 1980s, but it could also be considered as a primitive ancestor of today's smart plug -- that is, if you can say anything from a few decades ago is primitive. Smart plugs offer greater convenience than The Clapper ever did, letting you control your devices from an app on your phone, your voice, or a schedule.

Matter, the smart home connectivity protocol that revolutionized the IoT world, has done wonders to bridge the interoperability gaps between brands. For various reasons, however, Matter hasn't completely solved the problem of incompatibility in the smart home. IoT company Copilot.cx aims to change that by giving users access to different brands' devices with a single mobile app. Copilot.cx has introduced Copilot Star, a platform that enables manufacturers to builda branded app based on a single framework, connecting smart home devices running on different platforms.

All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don't.

I'm blown away that I can write data to a little chip and then access that using a phone or tablet. I've embedded NFC tags into all sorts of things, from documents to business cards to 3D-printed objects. And it's easy! What you'll need You need two things: NFC tags: These come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from to to .