AI is booming, but not in smart homes

An AI-powered smart home voice assistant that amiably chats with you, follows your orders with ease, and does your bidding in the background? It's a tantalizing idea that seems so close, yet remains stubbornly far away. The big prediction last year was that a new Apple smart hub powered by an AI-augmented Siri would arrive by spring 2025--right around now--complete with a touchscreen and smart home controls. It was a device that would vault Apple back into the smart home game. And then there was Google, which had begun testing Gemini on its Nest smart speakers late last year, allowing a small subset of its users to chat with the powerful AI model when asking more complex questions.