Four months before its anticipated launch, some experts have already discounted Apple HomePod's prospects for success. HomePod, due in December, is Apple's belated entry into the connected speaker market and a challenger to Amazon's leader in the space, the Echo. These devices, which understand human commands, can be used to order food, play music, and look up information on Wikipedia. Connected speakers are part of a broader white-hot market for connected home devices, which Amazon, and Google hope to control against rival devices planned by number of others like Apple and Microsoft. All of these companies want consumers to use their respective technology to control connected gadgets, from smart lights and thermostats to audio-video gear.

Amazon.com is developing its first wearable product--a pair of "smart glasses" that will allow you to use its digital assistant Alexa wherever you are, according to the Financial Times. The FT said the new glasses would connect wirelessly to a smartphone and would boast a "bone-conduction audio system" allowing the person wearing the spectacles to hear Alexa's voice without headphones. The move is a risky one, given the difficulty that the likes of Google and Apple have had in making wearables mainstream over recent years. And Amazon itself has had its fair share of expensive failures in hardware in the past --notably with its Fire smartphone, on which it took a $170 million write down. However, Jeff Bezos's company feels it's worth the risk because it can enhance in a big way a product that has already proved extremely popular.

Amazon's first wearable device will be a pair of smart glasses with the Alexa voice assistant built in, according to a report in the Financial Times. The device will reportedly look like a regular pair of glasses and use bone-conduction technology so that the user can hear Alexa without the need for earphones or conventional speakers. It won't, however, likely have a screen or camera, although Google Glass founder Babak Parviz has apparently been working on the project following his hiring by Amazon in 2014. The FT report also says that Amazon is working on a home security camera separate from its ever-expanding lineup of Echo devices; the product that ultimately turned out to be the Echo Look was widely assumed to be a more conventional security camera when it first leaked. Amazon's Echo Show already lets you view the feed from other security cameras, a feature naturally pegged for the company's own upcoming model. "One or both" of these products may arrive this year, according to the FT's sources, alongside updated Echo products.

AI that can understand how you're feeling based on the emotion in your voice will open up whole new areas of personalization. You know when people say that it's not what you say, but how you say it that matters? Well, very soon that could become a part of smart assistants such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri. At least, it could if these companies decide to use new technology developed by emotion tracking artificial intelligence company Affectiva. Affectiva's work has previously focused on identifying emotion in images by observing the way that a person's face changes when they express particular sentiments.

Apple showed off those features as the centrepiece of the introduction of the new watch, and charges people $70 extra for the feature as well as a charge that must be paid to phone networks. "It became apparent after my first full day using the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE that something wasn't right," wrote Lauren Goode on the Verge. By 11:42 that morning, after 60 minutes of working out with LTE, multiple attempts to use Siri, and two seven-minute phone calls, the Watch's battery had drained to 27 percent." "We have discovered that when Apple Watch Series 3 joins unauthenticated Wi-Fi networks without connectivity, it may at times prevent the watch from using cellular," the company said in a statement provided to The Verge.

Amazon's Alexa smart assistant has already transitioned from just being on the Echo speakers to being an AI assistant on smartphones. Now, a new report claims that Amazon is planning to put Alexa on a pair of smart glasses. This new Amazon Alexa smart glasses was first reported by the Financial Times citing people familiar with Amazon's plans. According to the source, the Alexa-powered smart glasses will be able to work anytime and anywhere and are designed to look like a regular pair of eyeglasses. The Amazon Alexa smart glasses will be tethered to a smartphone.

"The most inspiring person you've ever met could be sitting under this ad," read the signs plastering the walls of New York's subway cars this winter. An oversized finger pointed downward--straight at said inspiring commuters. "Say hello now...or later on Shapr." Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. The brainchild of Ludovic Huraux, a French entrepreneur best known for building a popular French dating site, Attractive World, Shapr is an app that helps you meet new professional connections. It launched in 2014 as a thinly-disguised version of LinkedIn, allowing users to add second-tier contacts--friends of friends--to their business circles.

We've got our full verdict on Apple's iPhone 8. You'll have to wait to see how the iPhone X fares, but now Google is the latest company angling for our new smartphone-buying dollars. And, oops, the phones have leaked (again) ahead of anything official. We also have a portable(ish) fire pit, because the outdoors needs gadgets, too. Hopefully you weren't set on waiting until October 4th to find out about Google's new hardware, because some pricing and specs have already leaked. Droid-Life found details on the Pixel phones, which will have familiar prices and storage setups, as well as the Daydream View VR headset, which is getting a $20 price hike.

Amazon is planning to release a pair of Alexa-enabled smartglasses as the latest addition to its range of voice-controlled devices, according to reports. Unlike most previous smartglasses, such as the ill-fated Google Glass experiment and Snapchat's Spectacles, the Amazon glasses won't feature a camera in any form, bypassing the privacy concerns that have plagued the form-factor in the past. Instead, they will focus on providing a link to Alexa, Amazon's voice-controlled personal assistant, through a bone-conduction audio system, which transmits sounds into the wearer's head by vibrating their skull, rather than through headphones inserted in their ear. According to a report by the Financial Times, the glasses could be revealed at a product launch event expected to be held soon alongside a home security camera, designed to tie in with its Echo Show video screen. Other reports have suggested the company will shortly release a new version of the Fire TV, its streaming media set-top box, with an Echo-style speaker system built-in.

The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL weren't the only upcoming Google products that were recently leaked. The cheaper Google Home Mini, Chromebook Pixel 3 and Daydream View 2 VR headset were all revealed in a massive leak yesterday and all of which are expected to be revealed by Google on Oct. 4. First up is the Google Home Mini, which appears to be the smaller and cheaper version of the Google Home smart speaker. Photos of the Home Mini were leaked by Droid Life yesterday, and it will be available in three colors: chalk (grey), charcoal (black) and coral (pink). The Google Home Mini features a small hockey puck-like speaker. It appears that the smart speaker will still be wired and will feature LED lights on top, which will most likely function as the indicator to show that a user is interacting with Google Assistant.