Thanks to falling demand for PCs and increased competition from rival chip makers, it looks like Intel may be planning to layoff thousands of employees soon.  In addition to the introducing the new Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5 today, Microsoft has unveiled a Surface Studio 2+ for creative professionals… but it’s a kind of […]
smart home
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7 Comments on Raspberry Pi-based Home Assistant Amber lets you build your own smart home hub (crowdfunding)
Raspberry Pi-based Home Assistant Amber lets you build your own smart home hub (crowdfunding)
7 Comments on Raspberry Pi-based Home Assistant Amber lets you build your own smart home hub (crowdfunding)Home Assistant is free and open source home automation software that allows you to control and interact with smart home gadgets. You can install the software on a single-board computer or in a virtual machine on a Windows, Mac, or Linux PC. But soon there may be another option: the Home Assistant team is running […]
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Lilbits: Amazon Echo Wall?
Amazon’s new Echo Show 10 smart display with a screen that moves so that it’s always looking at you like a pair of eyeballs from one of those creepy paintings is set to begin shipping later this month. But it might not be the only new Amazon Echo device coming this year. Bloomberg reports that […]
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Lilbits 396: Smart home… at a cost
Wink sells a line of smart home products including hubs, motion sensors, door and window sensors, and chimes. The company’s systems also work with third-party smart lights, cameras, doorbells, and other accessories. And up until recently, you could use Wink’s products for free after paying for the hardware. Then this week the company announced it […]
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Amazon teaches Alexa a bunch of new tricks, turns it into a security system (and more)
Amazon’s Alexa voice service already lets you get answers to questions, listen to music, news updates, or weather forecasts, play games, or control smart home gadgets with your voice. But in addition to launching a bunch of new hardware today, Amazon unveiled some upcoming Alexa features that could make the company’s voice assistant technology even […]
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Mozilla Offers a Slick New Way to Control Your Smart Home
Mozilla may have put Firefox OS for smartphones on ice, but they didn’t just walk away from the operating system completely. They went looking for other places to put its code to good use. Smart homes seemed like a good fit. What they cooked up was Things Gateway. It’s an open source home automation control […]
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Roku to launch voice assistant and whole home audio support
Roku makes some of the most popular media streaming devices for TVs, and for the past few years the company has also been licensing its software to TV makers so that you can buy a TV that has Roku functionality baked in. Now the company is getting ready to expand its licensing program with a […]
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Cortana learns to speak to smart home devices
Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant is built into every PC that ships with Windows 10. You can interact with Cortana by voice or by typing a question or request. And it does many of the same things other voice assistants including setting reminders, providing news or weather updates, or telling jokes. There’s also support for third-party […]
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$149 Amazon Echo Plus is a smart home hub (and smart speaker)
Along with the new $99 Amazon Echo smart speaker, $130 Echo Spot device, and $70 Fire TV with 4K support, Amazon is launching a new premium Echo device called… the Echo Plus. It’s basically an Amazon Echo smart speaker + smart home hub all built into a single device that looks a lot like the […]
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Apple’s Siri-powered Echo competitor’s key selling point: It’s an Apple product
Amazon may have launched the smart speaker market with the introduction of its first Echo device a few years ago. But these days you can also opt for a Google Home with similar functionality, and soon you’ll start to find speakers that use Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant. Apple wants in on the action too. There’ve […]