One way to build out a smart home is to buy lots of components--sensors, smart bulbs, security cameras, speakers, and whatnot--and connect them all to a hub that helps them communicate with each other and with you, via your smartphone. But let's be real: That can involve spending a lot of money and investing a lot of time. If your wants and needs are simpler, just a few relatively inexpensive products will deliver most of the conveniences a high-end smart home can deliver, and on a much more modest budget. And if you make sure those smart home products are compatible with each other, you'll build a solid foundation that you can expand over time. The key is knowing which smart home products don't depend on a smart home hub to operate.

It's been more than a year since Amazon introduced the Echo Frames to the world, and this month, the connected glasses finally became widely available for purchase. For $250, you get hands-free access to Alexa wherever you go. Plus, you can take calls, play music and hear your notifications through the device's open-ear speakers, while still being aware of your surroundings. To be clear, though, that's pretty much all the Echo Frames do; there's no display or camera. Still, there's potential here, especially for people who already wear glasses and want to interact with their phone without touching it.

We propose a novel Transformer encoder-based architecture with syntactical knowledge encoded for intent detection and slot filling. Specifically, we encode syntactic knowledge into the Transformer encoder by jointly training it to predict syntactic parse ancestors and part-of-speech of each token via multi-task learning. Our model is based on self-attention and feed-forward layers and does not require external syntactic information to be available at inference time. Experiments show that on two benchmark datasets, our models with only two Transformer encoder layers achieve state-of-the-art results. Compared to the previously best performed model without pre-training, our models achieve absolute F1 score and accuracy improvement of 1.59% and 0.85% for slot filling and intent detection on the SNIPS dataset, respectively. Our models also achieve absolute F1 score and accuracy improvement of 0.1% and 0.34% for slot filling and intent detection on the ATIS dataset, respectively, over the previously best performed model. Furthermore, the visualization of the self-attention weights illustrates the benefits of incorporating syntactic information during training.

You won't have to go out of your way to catch Queen Elizabeth II's annual Christmas Day message if you have an Echo (or a similar device) on hand. The Guardian reports that the Queen's message will be available on smart speakers for the first time through Amazon's Alexa. So long as you live in an English-speaking country, you can ask Alexa to "play the Queen's Christmas day message" after 3PM GMT (10AM ET) and get the inspiring speech while you're finishing a holiday meal. Google Assistant and HomePod users are out of luck for the on-demand message, but you can always stream BBC Radio 4 on your speaker to get the live broadcast. It's a relatively late move when smart speakers have been around for several years.

Self-reinforcing feedback loops are both cause and effect of over and/or under-presentation of some content in interactive recommender systems. This leads to erroneous user preference estimates, namely, overestimation of over-presented content while violating the right to be presented of each alternative, contrary of which we define as a fair system. We consider two models that explicitly incorporate, or ignore the systematic and limited exposure to alternatives. By simulations, we demonstrate that ignoring the systematic presentations overestimates promoted options and underestimates censored alternatives. Simply conditioning on the limited exposure is a remedy for these biases.

Fans of the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast will be able to listen without lifting a finger – and not just because the TV's been tuned to BBC One since The Gruffalo at 8.55am. Alexa users will be able to summon Her Majesty into their living rooms from 3pm GMT with the words "Alexa, play the Queen's Christmas Day message". The privilege isn't reserved just for Brits. Anyone with their Amazon Echo set to English – be that British, American, Australian, Canadian or Indian – will be able to listen to the speech, Amazon has announced. "After a challenging year, millions of people from across the Commonwealth will be eagerly awaiting Her Majesty the Queen's message on Christmas Day," said Eric King, the director of Alexa Europe.

The Sonos Arc is a pricy but peerless home audio package. Sonos' first-ever Dolby Atmos soundbar is more than just a pretty (and tubular) face. This powerful hunk of well fashioned plastic is loaded with 11 individually powered drivers, including dual speakers pointed upward to bounce off your ceiling, creating an impressively potent example of the hemispheric immersion for which Dolby's Atmos sound format is so highly praised. Its well-tuned drivers offer a rich and smooth sound signature that's fantastic for anything you play, from sitcoms to streaming music. Speaking of streaming, like all Sonos speakers, the Arc offers WiFi connection through the Sonos app, along with the ability to connect with other Sonos speakers, either in a group, or as part of a surround sound setup. This allows you to add dual surround speakers and a Sonos subwoofer if you want, though the Arc offers impressive bass response even without one. Like the Sonos Beam, it also sports built-in microphones and your choice of Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa support, making it both a soundbar and a powerful smart speaker. The drawback of all these features is, of course, the price of $799, which puts the bar beyond the average budget.

As promised, Amazon is adding group calling to Echo devices -- just in time for those socially distant holiday get-togethers. If you live in the US, you can use Alexa to start a group call on our Echo speaker or display. So long as one person in your circle has created a group, anyone in that group can start a voice or video conversation with other members. As you might imagine, that could be particularly helpful for connecting with family. Both Zoom and Amazon Chime calls are rolling out on the Echo Show 8 to let you join videoconferences without reaching for a laptop or handheld device.

The Zoom video meeting service is finally coming to Amazon's Echo Show video device, five months after first being announced. This follows the launch of the service on Facebook's Portal video device in September, and Google's announcement this week that a limited preview of Zoom for the Nest Hub Max video device was now available. Fine print alert: Google's preview hasn't yet opened to the general public and Amazon's Zoom support is only available on one of the three Echo Show devices, the 8-inch model, which is currently holiday-priced at $44.99. Amazon also has models with 5-inch and 10-inch screens. Zoom was named the most downloaded app of the year by Apple, as the pandemic changed the way we learn and work from home.

We've come to hold Apple devices to a high standard. They have a track record of performance, quality materials, and seamless integration (if only with each other). The HomePod Mini is exactly what we expected: Apple quality and Apple's proprietary ecosystem. It feels heavy in the hand, the power cord is thick and has a sturdy connection to the Mini's base, and the lights on top are beautiful, swirling colors like you'll see when you summon Siri on and iOS device. But how does it stack up to comparable smart speakers?