For those of us building a smart home, we all face the same problem: Which digital assistant to use? Between the vast libraries of skills and abilities of the two biggest players, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, it can be tough to choose. But the good news is that you actually don't have to. You can comfortably live with both assistants under one roof thanks to these helpful tips. You've got a Google Home at one end of the living room and the best Echo speaker, Amazon's Echo (third-generation) at the other--which one is worth talking to all the time? Both Google Assistant and Alexa offer plenty of connected home prowess. This is precisely why it's so hard to choose between the two.

Not all voice assistants can handle the same requests. We put Siri, Alexa and Google to the test. LOS ANGELES – When you pose the simplest of questions to Siri and it can't answer "what's 1% of $1 million," yet Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant can, you know just how far behind Apple's assistant has fallen to rivals. Siri was the first voice assistant, announced in 2011 for the iPhone 4S, but over the past several years, Amazon and Google have rolled over it, by investing heavily and introducing many new features, while Siri "hasn't moved forward much," says Bret Kinsella, who runs the Voicebot.ai Apple traditionally takes center stage at its Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) to unveil new software features to whet app makers' appetites, and often they involve Siri.

Smart home devices understand men better than women, according to a new YouGov survey. It found 67 per cent of female owners say that their device fails to respond to a voice command at least'sometimes', compared to 54 per cent of male owners. It also revealed men are ruder to their devices but experience fewer problems being understood. Men are more likely to take an brusque tone with theirs than women yet women have more problems with getting a response to their commands. The smart devices seem to respond less well to women than men, based on the survey results.

All three a virtual tie, but each had questions they couldn't answer. Tune in to find out where Apple, Google and Amazon fell down. LOS ANGELES -- Apple this week had every opportunity to show off new voice skills for Siri, the personal digital assistant, and to prove that it could be competitive with Amazon and Google. Instead, it pretty much took a pass. At its annual developers conference Monday, the company spent 15 minutes on new augmented reality updates, nearly a half-hour on updates to a fall macOS software update and over an hour on the new version of iOS12, the mobile operating system upgrade for the iPhone and iPad that will be out in the fall.

In the future, video technology and facial recognition will change the way meetings are conducted, reshaping the experience for both attendees and the company. This new technology will be able to read the room and evaluate people's reaction to what is said. Even though this technology isn't ready to enter our offices, the premises of such technology are entering in play. In this blog post we will try to push forward what we already talked about, to see to which extent these new breakouts might impact our ways of collaborating. Imagine this, you walk into your meeting/conference room with several of your co-workers for a meeting.

Montgomery is the CEO of Mycroft, which for the past few years has been building an open-source alternative to big tech's voice assistants. He doesn't trust any of those companies–not Google, nor Apple, nor Amazon–to protect people's privacy or act in users' best interests. "When you look the history of big tech, and what they've done with user data, it's full of privacy issues. It's full of self-enrichment at the expense of the user," Montgomery says. "I don't have any confidence at all that they're not going to use those same techniques and tactics in their new technology."

When GE introduced its latest C-series smart light bulbs, the focus was on affordability -- as they talked directly to your phone through Bluetooth, you didn't need a bridge device. That kept them out of touch of voice assistants, however, which meant replacing the whole lot if you wanted hands-free control. Well, you won't have to rethink your investment from now on: GE has introduced a hub, the C-Reach, that puts its bulbs on WiFi to enable support for Amazon's Alexa and (by the end of 2017) Google Assistant. As with most smart lighting kits, you can steer lights individually or in groups just by talking to your phone or a smart speaker. The C-Reach is available on Amazon right now, although whether or not it makes sense depends on what you buy and when.