Google has set out to make its mark on the headphone world with Pixel Buds -- wireless headphones that can control your phone and that claim to translate conversations in real time. But how do they stack up? Google sent us a pair to review to find out. The most important thing you should know about Pixel Buds is that their full features only work with Google's newest smartphone, the Pixel 2. While they'll function with other phones, you must have a Google Pixel phone -- last year's Pixels, the Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL (which, buyer beware, have had some early quality-control issues) -- to access the Pixel Buds' marquee feature: real-time translation. To be honest, it's not exactly real-time.

As AI-powered automated personal assistants have increasingly found their way into our lives, their tremendous power at certain tasks has often been undermined by their inability to fuse the data available to them into a comprehensive view of our lives and, perhaps most importantly, their inability to actively anticipate our needs rather than merely passively respond to queries posted to them. How might adding proactive anticipatory reasoning and the ability to look across data allow our future AI assistants to be far more useful in our day-to-day lives? As I was taking a cab to the airport this past Friday, I noticed everywhere around me preparations for the Marine Corp Marathon, which I had completely forgotten was this weekend and which meant that when I returned early Sunday morning I was going to have difficulty getting home given all of the road closures in my neighborhood. Yet, despite having access to my calendar, which clearly noted my return flight arrival on Sunday, and being able to tell me that there was a giant marathon running directly through my neighborhood on Sunday with road closures all around my home, my AI assistant was unable to connect the two and anticipate that I might have trouble getting home via my usual route on Sunday. Heading to a meeting a week ago, my assistant could tell me there was a huge traffic delay along the way when I explicitly asked for a traffic update, but was unable on its own to connect that to my next calendar appointment and proactively suggest 30 minutes earlier that I leave half an hour early to avoid being late.

The absence of Amazon's Alexa and Prime Music services in Canada has been a strange oversight, given that the nation's share a border and (one of two) common languages. That has now been corrected, as Amazon has finally launched the Echo family, Prime Music and Alexa Voice services and skills in the land of hockey and poutine. "We're excited to bring [Alexa] to Canada with an experienced designed from the ground up for our Canadian customers," said Amazon Senior VP Tom Taylor in a statement. Amazon has introduced a new English voice for Alexa with a Canadian accent, though even we Canadians aren't exactly sure what that is. However, Alexa doesn't seem to be available yet in French, which is bit surprising considering that it's one of Canada's two official languages (Engadget has reached out for more information).

The healthcare industry has been around for millennia. Although much has changed in the way it currently functions, it needs to transform into something better to serve the sick. To put it in simpler terms, the healthcare industry needs a new nervous system to function efficiently. This is where artificial intelligence comes into the picture. In healthcare, artificial intelligence has seen a consistent rise in adoption.

Home security cameras have a couple of ways of maximizing the amount of room real estate they can cover. Ultra-wide angle lenses are the most common solution, but they often cause distortion as they squeeze the image to fit. Cameras with motorized pan-and-tilt features let you sweep the room, but this leaves you turning your back on one part of a room to see what's happening in another. The Guardzilla 360, as its name suggests, pulls off the neat trick of monitoring an entire room all at once. The Guardzilla 360 uses the same pyramid design as the original Guardzilla All-In-One HD Security Camera, but this model is equipped with 1712p HD camera on the top pointing up.

Personalized experiences are a hot topic these days. Certain types of businesses have become very skilled at delivering personalized service. Think about a hotel you've stayed at before that welcomes you back and remembers that you liked a certain type of pillow, a specific newspaper and a corner room. The experience is becoming more and more common, and this type of service is crossing over into many other industries, especially retail. When a customer walks into a retail store, the salesperson has two choices: simply ring up a purchase, or truly help the customer get what he or she really needs.

The spread of Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Samsung's Bixby is changing the way consumers interact with technology. Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is doing more than ever to handle and protect payments.

Just in time for the impending release of its higerh-fidelity Google Home Max smart speaker, Google has given its Home app a makeover, bringing advanced audio settings, smarter search, and better navigation. Anyone who owns an Assistant or Chromecast device knows how easy it is to set it up using the Home app, but now Google is giving us a reason to open more often. The entire app has been redesigned, with a clean aesthetic and more intuitive navigation. For example, when you want to find a movie or song, the search bar is at the bottom of the screen, just like it is on the new Pixel phones. The new Google Home app has audio controls, in-app movie trailer casting, and smarter search.

Google Home is becoming all sorts of useful. You can already use the family of smart speakers along with Chromecast to control your Spotify and Netflix accounts, watch CBS All Access and CW television shows, and manage YouTube's live TV service. Now, Google is updating the Google Home app with a new, more useful layout, recommended streaming content, a better search system, redesigned controller interfaces and even movie trailers. The updated app is available today in the Google Play store; the iOS app was apparently updated a few days back. The updates are all aimed at making the Home experience just a bit more intuitive, like putting important navigation buttons at the bottom of the app's screen.

You no longer have to be picky about which voice assistant you use to steer Ecobee's smart thermostats. Google Assistant now offers control over Ecobee3 and Ecobee4 models, letting you tweak the temperature from your phone or an Assistant-equipped speaker like those in the Home lineup. It's a relatively simple addition, but it means that Ecobee's thermostats now respond to voice commands from three of the major voice assistants (Alexa, Assistant and Siri) in some capacity -- sorry, Cortana fans. The move gives Ecobee an edge over Nest's thermostats, which already had Alexa and Google Assistant support but still lacks the native HomeKit support it would need for Siri. You don't necessarily want to pick a thermostat just for its voice input options.