Imagine being at a crowded convention or noisy bar and trying to have a conversation with someone across from you. It's tough enough for people with hearing to focus on what the person is saying, not to mention those with hearing loss. Assistive technology company OrCam has rolled into CES 2024 with a host of new products including a set of devices and an iPhone app designed to help those with hearing loss deal with auditory overload. The platform is called OrCam Hear and after a quick hands-on at the show in Las Vegas, I'm pleasantly surprised. OrCam Hear consists of a pair of earbuds and a dongle that plugs into any phone, and you'll use the app to control who you want to listen to.

I've had something of a tricky relationship with dongles. Specifically, the humble USB-A dongle--the little thing you plug into your desktop or laptop computer to make wireless peripherals like keyboards, mice, and headsets, work. These little things have caused me no end of sleepless nights, emotional anguish, and personal turmoil. They look and feel extremely janky when they're plugged into a laptop, doubly so when you have to plug a USB-A dongle into a USB-C dongle because so many laptops now have only USB-C ports. They're awful, I hate them, and I wish ill upon them.

The giant TVs and high-end laptops might get the lion's share of attention on Black Friday, but the smaller tech devices are worth checking out too. We put the cap at $50 and came up with over 20 deals on inexpensive gadgets along with a few peripherals and accessories you'll need for this year's higher-end buys. Some gadgets are going for all-time lows, like the new Echo Dot. Others, like the Google Nest Mini and the Roku Streaming Stick 4K are half off their usual price. We added a few storage cards that are seeing big price cuts too, since you can never have too many of those.

Google's latest streaming dongle is so similar to the previous one that when I first opened it up, I experienced a little deja vu. The new Chromecast with Google TV still has a puckish oval design, it comes packaged with an identical remote and even the OS powering everything is (largely) unchanged. The only major difference (at least on the outside) is updated packaging that features a label that says "HD." So instead of supporting 4K displays, this new more affordable Chromecast is aimed squarely at people looking to stream shows and movies on 1080p screens. And from where I'm sitting, that's just fine, because while it's limited to HD content, this thing delivers essentially the same great watching experience that we loved on the original.

Android TV fans looking for something a bit more powerful than a Chromecast should consider the NVIDIA Shield TV. However, now you can grab the NVIDIA Shield TV for $130, or $20 off its normal price. That's almost a record low -- we saw it drop to $129 ahead of Black Friday last year -- but this is the best price we've seen in 2021, and it's only come around a couple of times so far. Despite being more expensive than streaming dongles of similar size, the NVIDIA Shield is worth the extra money thanks to its Tegra X1 processor. It's powerful enough to run the Android TV platform with ease, and it supports Dolby Vision HDR, Dolby Atmos audio, Chromecast 4K and AI-powered HD-to-4K upscaling. It also works with the Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa, so you can bark orders at it instead of using the triangular remote if you wish.

Google's latest Chromecast streaming media dongle is a bit different. With a full interface and a remote, the new Chromecast with Google TV costs £59.99 and sits above the basic £30 Chromecast. You can still Google Cast to the new device, but the new flat plastic dongle is more than just a simple receiver, running the full Android TV software similar to the Nvidia Shield or smart TVs from Sony and others. Once plugged in, the new Chromecast is set up using the Google Home app on an Android, iPhone or iPad in about five minutes. Scan the QR code on your TV, log in with the required Google account, and choose some apps to install.

The EPOS Adapt 660 wireless headset has active noise canceling to cut out surrounding noise. AI mics ... [ ] mean that when you use the headset to make phone calls, everything sounds much clearer than a regular headset. If I were to ask you to imagine a headset for making voice and video calls, I'm fairly confident you would think of something that looks like a pair of headphones with a microphone on a boom that sits in front of your mouth to pick up speech clearly. But if I were to ask you the same question in five years, I'd probably get a different answer. The reason for this is all down to progress being made thanks to AI or artificial intelligence.

Apple's new iPad Pro won't replace your computer. As the company's latest take on its idea of "the future of computing," it's a fantastic understudy to your current laptop. As an iPad, it outshines the competition, and lets artists and creative professionals get work done without a mouse or keyboard. As a tool, it still benefits from amazing portability, and a strong ecosystem of apps. But conducting your activities the way you would on a computer will only lead you to frustration.

To answer the question posed in the subhed, no, Polk didn't create the Command Bar by taking a hole saw to the middle of its chassis and dropping an Amazon Echo Dot in there. But the feature is unquestionably designed to look like that, and this soundbar does support Amazon's Alexa digital assistant. Soundbars are hot these days, and they run the gamut from sub-$100 cheapies to the ludicrously priced, but wow-it's-impressive Creative X-Fi Sonic Carrier. Polk is going after the better-than-entry-level market with this $300 speaker. That makes it $100 cheaper than the recently reviewed Sonos Beam, and it comes with a nicely matched subwoofer.

There aren't many gadgets that I'm still using five years after I buy them, except for maybe a laptop. Even then, that's getting quite long in the tooth given how quickly upgrades arrive these days. Chromecast and Google Cast are still things that I use multiple times a day, every day. When Google first introduced the Chromecast in 2013, the company promised to make any TV with an HDMI port a smart display with the combination of a thumbdrive-like dongle and your home WiFi. That it did, but in the months that followed, Google expanded the tech undergirding its TV accessory well beyond that $35 device.