UNMISSABLE SMART HOME UPGRADES

Spending more time indoors? Then you need to make sure you have the top smartest tech working for you

- David Nield

SPEAKERS

Far from being just jabbering jukeboxes, speakers have rapidly become the brain that can make your home so smart

It was way back in 2014 that the Amazon Echo was unexpectedly unveiled, launching a product category that has grown to become essential for a lot of us – many households now have at least one smart speaker installed, and as we’ll show here, there’s never been a broader choice of options to pick from.

The flexibility of voice control has played a big part in making the smart speaker a success. These devices can answer questions, read out messages, make phone calls, play music, give you the weather forecast, tell you the news, and of course control all the bits and pieces that make up your smart home system.

And the stars of these smart speakers are the digital assistants: Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant. They’re getting more intelligent all the time too, which means you get regular upgrades for your smart speaker without having to do anything.

You can find smart speakers in a wide variety of sizes, at several price points, with a choice of different levels of audio fidelity – if you’re interested in high-resolution Spotify streaming then your choice of the speaker might not be the same as the one you’d pick if you were just interested in occasional chats with Alexa.