smart home

Smart assistants have moved far beyond novelty — today they quietly manage calendars, control our homes, summarize work, and at times, raise serious questions about who owns the data they collect. Background / Overview Smart assistants — also called voice assistants or AI assistants — are...

Amazon quietly rewrote the rules for its voice assistant: Alexa+ (branded Alexa Plus) is now a cross‑surface, generative‑AI assistant available to Prime members at no extra cost and to non‑Prime users for $19.99 per month, and Amazon says the upgrade will reach a very broad set of existing Echo...

If you’ve got an old Windows 10 PC that can’t meet Windows 11’s TPM, Secure Boot, or CPU requirements, turning it into a Home Assistant server is one of the most useful and long‑lived repurposing moves you can make. Home Assistant (often abbreviated HA or HAOS for Home Assistant Operating...

Amazon’s push to move Alexa from a simple voice assistant to a subscription‑tiered, agentic web service has already started reshaping the smart‑home and desktop landscape — and not entirely in ways Amazon expected. The Alexa+ rollout (including a full web client at alexa.com) promises powerful...

YoSmart’s YoLink ecosystem has been the subject of a coordinated security disclosure: multiple vulnerabilities affecting the YoSmart cloud server, YoLink Smart Hub firmware, and the YoLink mobile application were reported and—per the vendor and independent researchers—have been addressed through...

Amazon’s plan to bring Alexa to Windows 10 PCs in early 2018 reshaped conversations about where voice assistants belong — not just in speakers and phones, but on the primary computing surface millions of people use every day — and the rollout that followed exposed both the promise and the...

CES 2026 feels like it will be another turning point for the television industry — not because every manufacturer will promise brighter panels or higher refresh rates, but because they will quietly commit to something far more consequential: true, measurable energy optimization built into TVs as...

TP-Link’s Kasa Smart remains a popular way to manage plugs, bulbs, switches and cameras — but the convenience of a native Windows or macOS desktop client is still missing, and the practical path for PC/Mac users is to run the mobile app inside an Android runtime or move to a cross‑brand hub...

The Geeni smart‑home app is a practical way to centralize control of bulbs, plugs, and cameras on a Windows PC — but getting there requires a bit of translation: the official Windows route is limited, so most PC installations use an Android emulator. The app itself is feature‑rich, free to use...

If you followed a short “Quick Steps to Install and Use Alexa on Windows” guide in 2022 or 2023, you may find the instructions still readable — but the reality of using Alexa on a modern Windows PC has changed. The basic workflow (get the Microsoft Store app, sign in with your Amazon account...

Samsung has begun rolling out Vision AI Companion, a generative‑AI upgrade to Bixby that brings a conversational, context‑aware assistant to its 2025 smart‑TV and monitor lineup — enabling viewers to ask about actors, scenes, live scores, recipes and travel suggestions, and receive visual...

Samsung’s Vision AI Companion turns the living-room television into an active, conversational home assistant — a generative-AI upgrade to Bixby that recognizes what’s on-screen, answers multi-turn questions, and orchestrates multiple cloud agents (notably Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity) to...

Samsung’s Vision AI Companion turns the living room television into an active, conversational hub — not just for streaming, but for language translation, gaming optimization, smart‑home control and multi‑agent AI assistance that brings Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity directly to the screen...

Wisenet’s SmartCam N1 is a competent indoor security camera with reliable facial recognition, local microSD recording and the sort of smart-assistant compatibility buyers expect — but its $150 asking price and the removal or monetization of cloud storage leave its value proposition unexpectedly...

Samsung has added Perplexity AI’s new TV app to its 2025 smart‑TV lineup, placing a dedicated Perplexity agent alongside Microsoft Copilot and Samsung’s own Bixby inside the Vision AI Companion ecosystem — a move that turns the living‑room screen into a multi‑agent, conversational hub for...

Rich’s roundup from CEDIA 2025 landed like a fast-moving tour of where the modern smart home is headed: pro-grade audio and outdoor AV, smart TVs with generative AI baked in, practical advice for Windows 10 users facing the October 14, 2025 end-of-support deadline, and a demonstration of how the...

Google’s decision to replace the long-serving Google Assistant on Nest and Google Home devices with a Gemini-powered assistant — branded Gemini for Home and launching into early access on October 1, 2025 — is one of the most consequential shifts in the smart‑home assistant market in years...

IFA 2025 made one thing unavoidably clear: artificial intelligence is no longer an experimental sidebar at trade shows — it’s the main stage. From conversational TV companions to penguin-like domesticated robots and a self‑flushing cat toilet that promises to log your pet’s health metrics, AI...

Samsung’s Vision AI Companion arrived at IFA 2025 as a deliberate pivot: a unified, multi‑agent AI hub for smart displays that folds on‑device vision features and third‑party conversational agents into a single, remote‑invoked experience designed for the living room and home office alike. The...

Samsung has quietly turned the living room into the next battleground for conversational AI by embedding Microsoft Copilot into its 2025 lineup of smart TVs and Smart Monitors, positioning Copilot as a voice‑first, visually rich assistant optimized for shared, couch‑side use. This integration —...