smart speaker

Amazon debuts new Echo devices, including Echo Studio with spatial audio

During Amazon’s hardware event this morning, the company announced new Alexa-powered Echo devices, including new Echo Dot and Echo Dot with Clock models. One of the more notable upgrades is Eero

Apple launches its Siri-only Apple Music Voice Plan with iOS 15.2

Apple is now rolling out access to its new, lower-cost Apple Music Voice plan, first introduced this fall at the company’s hardware event. The new service, designed largely for use with HomePod

Apple launches a new iOS app, ‘Siri Speech Study,’ to gather feedback for Siri improvements

Apple recently began a research study designed to collect speech data from study participants. Earlier this month, the company launched on the App Store a new iOS app called “Siri Speech Study&#

CMU researchers show potential of privacy-preserving activity tracking using radar

Imagine if you could settle/rekindle domestic arguments by asking your smart speaker when the room last got cleaned or whether the bins already got taken out? Or — for an altogether healthier us

Apple said to be developing Apple TV/HomePod combo and iPad-like smart speaker display

Apple is reportedly working on a couple of new options for a renewed entry into the smart home, including a mash-up of the Apple TV with a HomePod speaker, and an integrated camera for video chat, acc

Deep science: AI is in the air, water, soil and steel

This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.

White-label voice assistants will win the battle for podcast discovery

The voice assistant that can personalize podcasts and help listeners search, sample and discover content through shareable bite-sized pieces will win the voice wars.

Daily Crunch: Apple releases macOS Big Sur

The latest Mac operating system arrives, Amazon faces a lawsuit over PPE and Disney+ turns one. This is your Daily Crunch for November 12, 2020. The big story: Apple releases macOS Big Sur This update

Apple HomePod Mini review: Remarkably big sound

It’s hard to shake the sense that the smart speaker market would look considerably different had the HomePod Mini arrived several years back. It’s not so much that the device is transformative on

The smart speaker market is expected to grow 21% next year

New numbers from Canalys point to a strong growth in smart speaker shipments in Mainland China this year. The market is on track to grow in 2020, having gotten the COVID-19 pandemic mostly under contr

Amazon Echo review: Well-rounded sound

Six years ago, Amazon essentially created a new consumer electronics category. Expectations weren’t particularly high when the first Echo device debuted in November of 2014. Amazon, after all, has n

South Korean startup Cochlear.ai raises $2 million Series A to detect the sounds missed by speech recognition

Sit quietly for a moment and pay attention to the different sounds around you. You might hear appliances beeping, cars honking, a dog barking, someone sneezing. These are all noises Cochlear.ai, a Seo

Apple reveals the $99 HomePod Mini

Today, during its iPhone hardware event, Apple unveiled the $99 HomePod Mini. The HomePod Mini is clearly a reach for a broader swath of new users. The original HomePod managed to impress audiophiles,

TouchWood puts versatile, unobtrusive interfaces inside your desk, table and walls

Everything we do seems to have an associated app these days, and all day they vie for your attention, pinging and lighting up in their needy ways. TouchWood wants to tone down this exhausting non-stop

Where is voice tech going?

It’s a new world, and voice tech is shaping it.

COVID-19 quarantine boosts smart speaker usage among U.S. adults, particularly younger users

The coronavirus outbreak has driven more consumers to turn to their smart speakers for news, information, music and entertainment, according to new data released today by NPR and Edison Research. Arou

Apple and CMU researchers demo a low friction learn-by-listening system for smarter home devices

A team of researchers from Apple and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have presented a system for embedded AIs to learn by listening to noises in their environme

Survey shows growth in podcasts and voice assistants, little change in streaming

A new annual survey taken before the current COVID-19 crisis led to restrictions of movement in much of the U.S. suggests good news for Amazon, Facebook’s dominance unthreatened and continued gr

Smart speaker sales reached new record of 146.9M in 2019, up 70% from 2018

Global smart speaker sales hit a record high last year with shipments of 146.9 million units, up 70% over 2018, according to a recent report on the state of the smart speaker market from Strategy Anal

The robot homecoming is upon us

Robots were everywhere at CES, as has been the case for at least a decade. But there’s a different tenor to the robots shown off at the recent annual consumer tech event: they’re designed
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