Amazon unveiled their new Echo speaker to compete for consumers' money and mindshare. SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon's digital assistant Alexa is heading to India and it will get to Japan later in the year. But while it might pick up a slight accent on arrival, so far it's sticking to English to get around. Amazon announced Wednesday that it's opening up its Alexa Skills Kit (cleverly called ASK) for customers in India. It will also begin selling three Alexa-enabled devices in India: the Amazon Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot.

Four new features that make Google Home a better connected speaker than it was--but it still has growing pains, reports USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham on Talking Tech. Google Home Mini is covered in fabric and comes in three colors. Google Home is going big and going small, as Google challenges Apple and Amazon for smart speaker supremacy. On Wednesday, Google announced a $49 Google Home Mini speaker that will inevitably draw comparisons to Amazon's same-priced Echo Dot. Preorders start today; Home Mini ships Oct. 19.

Just what you need in the age of ubiquitous surveillance: the latest cochlear implants will allow users stream audio directly from their iPhone into their cochlear nerve. Apple and implant manufacturer Cochlear have made "Made for iPhone" connectivity available for any hearing implants that use the next-generation Nucleus 7 sound processor. The advance means that these implants can also stream music and Netflix shows. The technology was first unveiled in 2014 when it was added to hearing aids such as the Starkey Halo and ReSound LiNX. But this is the first time it's been linked into the central nervous system.

Google has unveiled a raft of new hardware in a bid to take on everyone from Amazon to Apple and Microsoft. Among the new releases are the Pixel 2 smartphone, a $99 Pixelbook convertible laptop and the $49 Home Mini speaker and $399 Max music speaker. Sundar Pichai began the presentation by saying it has been'hard to see the suffering' of the past few weeks, and in particular the Las Vegas shootings, saying our'hearts and prayers' and with the victims. Sundar Pichai began the presentation by saying it has been'hard to see the suffering' of the past few weeks, and in particular the Las Vegas shootings, saying our'hearts and prayers' and with the victims. He said the firm was working with disaster relief agencies to help where it could.

The market for devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home is so new that nobody really knows anything, except that smart speakers are fun as hell and they're probably important to the connected future of everything. We're firmly in the spaghetti-throwing phase of the technology, as companies experiment in public to find out what works. Barely a week after Amazon unveiled a half-dozen new Echo products, Google has a new smart speaker of its own. It's called the Google Home Mini, and it's just like the Google Home, but miniaturized. The $49 smart speaker looks like a mesh-wrapped pebble, and comes in three colors: gray, dark gray, and coral. The Home Mini is Google's equivalent to the Echo Dot: It has all the same features, only with a worse speaker and a smaller body.

This means that today marks the sixth year anniversary of when Apple's Siri was first introduced to the world, although the AI helper wouldn't be … Read more: Apple's Siri Turns Six: AI Assistant Announced Alongside iPhone 4s on October 4, 2011

The SEO landscape is constantly evolving, and marketers have to adapt to this evolution. Major Google updates have rendered manipulative SEO practices somewhat obsolete. But there is still a lot that marketers have to do to ensure that their websites are highly visible in relevant searches. This makes it crucial that you keep yourself updated on the latest changes and the future predictions in regards to SEO. And what better way to get your predictions and advice than from the top experts in search engine optimization. We are going to see more "knowledge-based trust" and the Google knowledge vault returning from Google, and the Semantic Web is going to make featured snippets and structured snippets more compelling and interesting to people doing marketing on the Web. People are going to be advertising in knowledge graphs, where entities actions are going to be the focus of their campaigns. "I am an entity," is going to be a goal for many more on the Web, because it will matter even more. My main prediction for 2018 is that traditional SEO real estate, like ranking 1-10, will continue to shrink. Increasingly, you will be fighting for Featured Snippets and Featured Videos. If you do not put a strategy in place to rank for featured snippets, you are going to be at a big disadvantage. Featured snippets, answer boxes and other SERP features are at a tipping point. Visitors now expect to see the answer right there in the search results. So we should expect that clickthrough rates will decline in general.

Well that took awhile: Sonos just announced that a public beta is incoming for Alexa support, a year after saying it was coming. At an event in New York today, the company said that the functionality will be rolling out to all current models of its speakers. Alexa support is provided by your Echo, Echo Dot or other enabled gizmo. With the firm saying Alexa is but the first voice control system, maybe don't be surprised if Google Assistant or Siri show up as well. Sonos is also working to get more developers onboard for its ecosystem, with a "Works with Sonos" certification program.

Now that Google is poised to have multiple Home speakers in its lineup, you're going to need a better way to manage those speakers -- and thankfully, it's already here. Google has revamped the Home app (currently just the Android version) with not only a fresh look, but support for assigning speakers to specific rooms. The tweak should make it easier to control specific speakers and even whole environments. If you want to stop music playback in the bedroom at the same time as you shut off the lights, you can issue a single command to do it all. Although you certainly weren't forced to use one Home speaker before, it's now crucial that Google knows just which device you're referring to.

Sonos has revealed its new speaker: the Sonos One, built so that you can shout at it. The company has updated its internet-controlled sound system to include microphones, so that it can be controlled just by talking to it. And that can be done in a whole range of ways: unlike similar offerings from Amazon, Google and Apple, Sonos's speaker can talk to a whole range of voice assistants, and play music from a huge set of different music services. The speaker will be available later this year, and can be pre-ordered from Sonos now. It costs $199 and the same in pounds – the same price as Sonos's Play:1 speaker, to which it looks almost identical.