There are a ton of tricks that smart displays can do. But not all of them are created equal or are worth doing on this style of advice. The basics are easy--just about anyone knows how handy it is to ask any smart speaker or smart display to tell you the weather or play music. It's their best use case, especially since smart displays like the Echo Show can give you more weather details onscreen. But that's not all these handy devices do, and for the price you should get the most out of any smart display you buy.

Have an idle laptop sitting on your desk on a kitchen counter? Lenovo has a novel idea: Turn it into an Amazon Echo Show, complete with Alexa. Slated to debut on various Lenovo Yoga and IdeaPad laptops later this year, Lenovo's Show Mode brings the Echo Show interface to a Lenovo PC, complete with support for voice commands and smart home control. With Show Mode enabled, a Lenovo laptop or desktop system would essentially act as an Echo Show smart display. Just as with a standard Echo Show, you could ask Alexa questions, command her to turn your lights on and off, get weather reports, play music, read your schedule, or make calls to other Echo speakers.

Nationwide stay-at-home orders prompted many of us to upgrade our homes with comfort, convenience, and security devices this year. And the smart home industry was all too happy to help us indulge those instincts. But not every product on this list was introduced in 2020. We're not going to avoid recommending a great product just because it hit the market earlier than January 1, 2020. We have more than one product in some categories, differentiated by price or feature set.

Zoom, the video conferencing app of the COVID era, is about to land on Amazon, Facebook, and Google smart displays. In a press release, Zoom announced it will make its initial debut on Facebook Portal displays next month, while Zoom integrations for Amazon Echo Show devices and Google Assistant-enabled displays, including the Nest Hub Max, are due this fall. The arrival of Zoom on the Amazon Echo Show (starting with the Echo Show 8) will be a major boost for Amazon's smart display, which up until now was only capable of one-on-one video calling. Google announced group calling on its Google smart displays via Google Meet and Duo in late June. Facebook's Portal smart displays support group calls of up to 50 people with Messenger Rooms and Workplace Rooms.

Those who want to outfit a room or two with smart displays can get a couple of Amazon's smaller Echo Shows for less at HSN. The online retailer has a bundle that includes one Echo Show 5 and one Echo Show 8 for $140, which is a great price and close to the sale prices we saw for both of those devices back in May. If you were to buy each smart speaker separately right now, you'd spend $170 -- and that's with both the Show 5 and the Show 8 technically being on sale. In May, Amazon dropped the prices of both smart speakers to their Black Friday lows. If you had purchased one of each then, you would have paid $130.

It is not uncommon for people to look fondly on their AI devices. "Alexa is my friend," says one senior. It is nice to have a friendly AI there to talk to, and to have it play music, tell you a joke, adjust your lights and room temperature and, in Lawrence's case, set the alarm clock. Today, more groups and organizations are studying the potential of interacting with Alexa as an intervention for loneliness in the elderly. For example, AARP Foundation has a program for "Social Connectedness Voice-activated Technology", which has a goal of determining whether technology of this type can help older adults fight isolation and loneliness.

The new second generation Echo Show is bigger with a better display, but is size enough to keep Amazon ahead of stiff competition from Google? Since the original Echo Show launched last year the software has been refined, but the experience is broadly the same. The Show is a voice-first Alexa speaker, with touch interactivity as an additional input rather than the core experience. If you never wanted to touch the screen beyond the initial set-up,you wouldn't have to. When you do go to touch it, swipes and taps work as you might expect from a modern smartphone. Swipe down from the top to reveal a quick settings shade, including a smart home control panel, a place to trigger Alexa routines and one-tap access to alarms.

Smart speakers are great, but smart displays are even better. They can do everything a smart speaker can do, but they can also show you things: Videos, lyrics, maps, commute conditions, weather reports, live TV, art, photographs, who's at the front door or sneaking through your backyard. When you don't want to use your voice, a smart display lets you control lights, your thermostat, door locks, and other smart home devices with touch instead. Two players dominate the smart display market today: Amazon, with its Echo Show, powered by its Alexa digital assistant (we won't consider the smaller Echo Spot here), and Google, with its Google Smart Home Hub, powered by its Google Assistant. After in-depth comparisons on seven eight counts, one emerges as the clear winner.

When Amazon unveiled the Echo Show last year, many people made fun of it for its bulky, awkward appearance. But it proved to be a pioneer in the smart display category, showing that adding a screen to a voice assistant was actually useful. So much so, that Google followed a few months later with its own line of Echo Show rivals, thanks to partners like Lenovo and JBL. Google's smart displays were better-looking and had a more intuitive interface, with desirable features like step-by-step recipes and YouTube integration. Amazon must have taken note of the competition, however, because the new Echo Show has undergone a serious upgrade, with an improved design, superior sound quality and enhanced entertainment options.

The second-generation Echo Show is better than the first in every respect, ranging from its industrial design to its audio and video performance. It's the best smart display today, but that could change as soon as tomorrow if Google announces its own smart display and it turns out to be great. Sonos, meanwhile, still has the best smart speakers for music (the Sonos One and the Sonos Beam). While the second-generation Echo Show is powered by the same system-on-chip as the first-generation Echo Show (a quad-core Intel Atom x5-Z8350), the new model is outfitted with a larger, higher-resolution display; better loudspeakers; a more attractive enclosure; an integrated ZigBee smart home hub; and even the option for hardwired ethernet. Alexa is also becoming a better digital assistant, a development that will improve every Echo model.