USA TODAY'S Ed Baig compares Google Home to the Amazon Echo. Ask Google Assistant inside Google Home what it thinks of Amazon Echo's Alexa and you get a gracious reply: "I like Alexa's blue lights. Her voice is nice too." Civility aside, the standalone $129 Home speaker that becomes available Friday is Google's answer to the $179.99 Echo speaker, and a potentially strong answer at that, though Google is still in catchup mode and too often answered my voice queries with a "sorry I don't know how to help with that yet."

The Google Assistant was the big news from the company's I/O conference earlier this year, but it took months for Google's true Siri competitor to really arrive. First it was baked into the largely unnecessary Allo chat app, and then it showed up as a flagship feature on the new Pixel phones. Now Google Home is shipping, putting the Assistant a voice command away even when your phone is in your pocket. Its inspiration is obvious: The $129 Home directly takes on the Amazon Echo. Indeed, many of the features here are the same.

Chatbots and conversational interfaces are the new big thing: they are intuitive, natural, and can be quickly deployed without downloading a new app. Use cases for enterprises are numerous: agenda management, customer support, ... During this talk, we will focus on one particular B2B application: how intelligent assistants can reinvent the way analysts and data scientists access and spread advanced data analytics across organizations.

Like many tech enthusiasts, I've been using a $180 Amazon Echo intelligent speaker at my home for a year or more. And, while I love using it for some things -- playing music and podcasts, setting timers, and re-ordering items from Amazon -- I've come to realize that, like Apple's Siri and all other virtual assistants, its Alexa voice-driven artificial intelligence system disappoints a lot. So I was excited to test Google Home, the $129 Echo competitor that puts the search giant's much-touted new Google Assistant intelligence technology inside a small, but powerful Echo-like speaker and microphone unit. Surely, I thought, after collecting all that info about the world (and about me) for years and years, Google would crush Amazon in the home-intelligence race. But after nearly a week of using two Google Home units in two different rooms, my conclusions are decidedly mixed.

Google Home is an interesting product to review. In a way, it's just an internet-connected microphone and speaker array that draws all of its smarts from the cloud. As far as the AI experience goes, Home delivers -- but that's no surprise, given that Google already has long had a lead over competitors like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana. Because its intelligence is in the cloud, it will also only get smarter over time (which makes these devices rather future-proof if you're thinking about them as an investment). We've already written quite a bit about the Google Assistant, which is at the core of the Home experience.

OK, now this is clever. That was my reaction when I asked Google Home, "What's the temperature inside?" and it replied, "It's currently 73 degrees, but the Nest is set to 65." Google's hyper-aware, voice-activated speaker dishes up a lot of surprising answers, and it's smarter, better sounding, and better looking than Amazon Echo. At $129, Google Home also beats the Echo's current price by $51. That's significant, because the two digital assistants promise essentially the same features and benefits. And both let you control other smart home devices with voice commands.

The good: Customizable design, Google Assistant helpful for answering questions and translations, Offers concise and clear answers The bad: Limited smart home compatibility, Doesn't support many apps yet Who should buy: Those who really care about having Google's search engine at the tip of their tongue and want little else. For about as long as I remember using the Internet, Google has been my encyclopedia, study aide, tour guide, news curator, and more. Given that Google processes more than two trillion searches per year, it's likely safe to say many Internet users around the world have a similar relationship with the search engine. Google is now looking to deepen our collective reliance on its search prowess by taking up residence in our living rooms, nightstands, and kitchens. Google Home, an Internet-connected speaker that can answer questions, play games and music, and control your other smart devices begins shipping Nov. 4.

After years of steady growth, innovation and sometimes disappointment, the robotics market is heating up on several fronts amid some new breakthroughs in the arena. Both the industrial and service robotics markets are hot. In addition, the consumer market is seeing a new level of interest, as the industry is invaded by the next wave of so-called personal assistant robots or social robots for the home. Asus, Blue Frog Robotics, InGen, Jibo, NEC, Samsung and others are developing various personal assistant robots for consumers. In addition, a number of companies from China are also developing them. Personal assistant robots might be the next big thing. "If successful, Jibo (and its competitors) could usher in a new consumer electronics market--social robots for the home," said Dan Kara, an analyst at ABI Research. "Personal robots, often called social robots, are technically advanced robots that interact directly with people and are designed to assist in the home, or to act as a companion," Kara said.

While online dating was once seen as a last resort for meeting a partner, one in five relationships now starts online. And it appears that the future may extend the ways to use technology to find love even further. A new study suggests that by 2026, smart home devices, including your toaster and wardrobe, could help you find love. As for smart wardrobes, eHarmony's research indicates clothing style is actually an extremely precise and detailed reflection of a person's personality. Smart appliances such as fridges, toasters, coffee makers and cooking devices could reveal a large amount of information about our diet, meal times and even spontaneity when choosing or preparing food.

There are few things hotter in tech right now than artificial intelligence. You'll hear people with titles like "chief experience officer" and "thinkfluence concierge" talk about "neural networks" and "machine learning" and "natural language processing." The idea is, you can talk to your computer as if it were a person. Eventually, the idea goes, you can hold full conversations with an AI chat bot, asking it to answer complex questions and undertake complicated tasks. But nearly two decades ago, our current era of AI overload started with two simple sentences.