With Smart Home technology taking off and smart home assistants (like Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple Siri) becoming more prevalent in homes the start of a new home technology revolution is underway. Homeowners can monitor and control the house heating and cooling systems, security systems, door locks, garage doors and more all from where ever they have access to internet on their smartphone. Artificial intelligence (AI) will add to that ability by allowing decisions about the home to be made without the need of direct input from the homeowner. For instance a trusted dog walker walks up to the front door during their scheduled time to take Fido out for a walk. The dog walker's face is seen via camera which an artificial intelligence assistant recognizes and knows they are there during the correct time and allows the door to be unlocked so Fido can enjoy some outdoor time while the homeowner is away.

Cruce Saunders This is "Towards a Smarter World," and I'm your host Cruce Saunders. Very pleased to be joined today by Elizabeth McGuane, who is the content strategy lead at Intercom where she is part of the product design team, and owns the language of the core product including its messenger app. Elizabeth's been working in UX for 10 years and before that was a journalist. I'm really glad she could be with us today. She recently wrote an amazing article to check out on TechCrunch, called "On Bots, Language, and Making Technology Disappear." Elizabeth, with that article, would you summarize some of your thinking behind how you ended up arriving the conclusion that actually naming a bot is not necessarily the best strategy? We did it through research, but I think where we started was through a really careful and considered approach to testing the language. When I started, this was one of the first projects I worked on at Intercom when I joined just over a year ago, and we were looking at introducing bot-like, very simple bot, into our messenger. We make a B2B messenger, so not to get to complicated in terms of the UX of our product, but we always have to think of our users in terms of two layers: we have our customers and then our customers' customers, and we were really creating a bot that businesses would use to communicate concepts or to get data from their customers. I knew that we need to be really careful about how we express things so that we would marry with the business' tone of voice so that we wouldn't be overstepping the bounds of what we could say on their behalf. I had a feeling, and this was really just my gut instinct, that having a very chatty personality would not necessarily marry with the tone of voice of every single business that wanted to use our messenger. It was a very practical consideration on that front. When we went into testing, we tested with a name and without out a name. We also did testing with different tones of voice because going into this I think the design leads were interested to see whether a more friendly tone of voice or a more functional tone of voice would work. That was the initial consideration of "let's just try different kinds of copy, and see what works." I felt that I wanted to take a more structured approach and try names, no names, functional, more friendly, then we also tried with a pronoun, without a pronoun. Once we realized that names didn't work we also tried removing the first person "I", and removing an introduction so that the bot didn't say, "Hi, I'm so-and-so's digital assistant," or what have you to see what impact that had. That's really where it started was with an actual structured approach to research.

Voice assistants are being integrated into every part of our daily lives, from smart speakers to home security and bizarrely, even to toilets. Google said it expects its Assistant to be installed on a billion devices soon, and Amazon recently announced that more than 100 million devices with Alexa have been sold. So Amazon's number isn't a billion (it isn't on millions of Android phones, after all), but support for Alexa continues to be built into more and more products, thanks in part to the Alexa Gadgets Toolkit launch last year, which gives developers APIs and technical documentation to make gadgets that can pair up with an Alexa device. Ahead, some of the more intriguing Alexa-enabled products spotted at CES 2019. LG's futuristic rollable TV is coming to market, with a refined base station and a 100-watt Dolby Atmos speaker.

Hello future, you are weird. At least it is here at CES 2019, the tech industry's biggest annual conference. It's where companies big and small come to launch gadgets and test new ideas. Not all of them make it to stores. But there's an eternal optimism that technology can solve, well, almost any problem -- even ones you never knew you had.

Amazon's latest low-cost Alexa-powered smart speaker, the third-generation Echo Dot, looks better, sounds better, but still costs the same budget-friendly £50. When the second-generation Echo Dot launched in the UK it had very little in the way of competition. Having everything that was good about Amazon's Alexa voice assistant squeezed into a smaller package half the price of the bigger Echo, it was a no-brainer. But now the Echo Dot has some stiff competition from Google, in the form of the £50 Home Mini and its Assistant, and Amazon's own second-generation Echo, which is now only £90. The Echo Dot is Amazon's small, puck-like smart speaker with the firm's Alexa voice assistant built in. New for the third generation is a softer, more rounded aesthetic with fabric sides.

Lenovo's Smart Tab M10 and P10 are ready to branch out from their humdrum Android tablet lives. Maybe you'll employ them a few hours a day as a tablet. But if you pair them with their included Smart Docks, they become Amazon Alexa-powered smart displays, expanding their usefulness around your home. The Smart Dock also acts as an auxiliary speaker for its connected tablet, offering better sound than you'd get from the tablet alone. The tablets themselves have front-firing speakers with Dolby Atmos technology, but they can't compete with a fuller-fledged speaker such as the Smart Dock provides.

If current Smart Displays are too big for your liking, Lenovo's new Smart Clock might be your jam. The Google Assistant-powered display isn't just small enough to fit on your nightstand--it's barely bigger than the smartphone in your pocket. With a 4-inch 480x800 touch screen, the Lenovo Smart Clock is the smallest smart display this side of the Amazon Echo Spot. And with a 113.88 x 79.2mm frame, it's sure to fit just about anywhere (as long as there's an outlet within reach). If those dimensions seem super small, they are--by comparison, the smaller Pixel 3 measures 145.6 x 68.2mm.

Google Assistant will soon be able to act as an interpreter, working as a go-between for natural conversations between initially 27 languages. Think of it as your own personal translator in your pocket. It's a pretty neat addition to the increasingly useful Google Assistant and will be rolling out over the next few weeks but I got a chance to try it out at CES in Las Vegas this week. You jump into interpretation mode by asking Google, say, "Hey Google, be my French translator." When I did that, the Google HomeHub smart display at a cafe Google had set up woke up and waited for my first words.

On paper, Google has all the ingredients to deliver a killer streaming TV player. It has a powerful software platform in Android, a first-rate voice assistant in Google Assistant, and a knack for designing slick software and hardware. What we've ended up with instead is Android TV, a platform that's gotten some traction on smart TVs and cable boxes, but hasn't been a hit on standalone streaming players. Devices like the Nvidia Shield TV and the Xiaomi Mi Box S offer some niche appeal, and Android TV has always offered some interesting ideas, but it's never met its potential as Google put more energy into Chromecast as a consumer streaming option. This will change in 2019, says Shalini Govil-Pai, Google's senior director of product management for Android TV.

As CES comes to a close, two things are certain: We won't be able to afford one of LG's jaw-dropping roll-up OLED TVs and Android is poised for another big year. While we might not have gotten a look at Samsung's folding phone yet (though we did get our hands on Royale's), there were plenty of low-key announcements in Las Vegas that could have a big impact on the rest of the year. From Google Assistant to Android TV, here are eight CES announcements that might have slipped under your radar. Google didn't bring its heavily rumored Pixel 3 Lite to CES, but it did bring a bunch of new Google Assistant tricks. Along with a new Interpreter Mode on Google Homes and Smart Displays that offers real-time translation of conversations in dozens of languages, you'll be able to check your flight info and get your boarding pass using Assistant on your Android phone.