At the Mi 9 launch event in China, Xiaomi has revealed that it's working on a smart home hub -- one with looks that might conjure up images of the Lenovo Smart Clock and the Google Home Hub. It's called the Xiao Ai Touchscreen Speaker Box, and while details are scant at the moment, the electronics maker dropped some details about it. Unfortunately, it's still not clear if it has Google Assistant and if it uses the same software as Google's and Lenovo's devices. But it has the power to control Xiaomi's smart products, including ACs, air purifier, lights, cameras and door bell monitors, using touch or voice commands. Since the device is also a clock, it will have a customizable clock face and an alarm function that can wake you up using either music or video, as well. You'll also be able to use its four-inch display to play video and show content from iQiyi, Sogou, Tencent's QQ services and Sina.

Google's aptly named AI helper, Google Assistant, is poised to have a great year in 2019. Not only will the digital assistant be spreading to numerous devices old and new, but there are a host of new features coming, too, several of which were shown off at CES 2019 last week. This list of upcoming Google Assistant updates is long, and it can be overwhelming trying to parse out all the different announcements and keep track of when these new features will finally be available. To help, we've curated a rundown detailing the best and most important updates coming for Google Assistant in the next few months, including what devices these new features have been announced for, their expected release dates, and how to enable them (when available). By far, the most hyped new Assistant feature at CES was the Interpreter Mode.

The Google Home Hub is already a great deal at $149. While it's not quite as full-featured as the second-generation of Amazon's Echo Show, it's still one of the best smart displays you can buy, with excellent smart home support, a compact design, and support for YouTube streaming. But today Target is making it more desirable than ever: The retailer has slashed the price of the Google Home Hub to $99, but that's not all--you'll also get two Google Home Minis for freeRemove non-product link. Some quick math reveals that this deal will save your whopping $149 on the full retail price of all three. If you've been considering either a Google Home Hub or a couple Google Home Minis, you should pounce on this deal.

Every trip around the sun, we prod, poke, and test hundreds of products here at WIRED. Most of them are just fine. Not boring--few things are truly boring these days. But a lot of what we see doesn't register more than a notch or two on the excite-o-meter. However, every so often, we get a product in our hands that clearly stands out, either by pushing its category forward with some new innovation, or perfecting an established and already noteworthy design.

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.

Stuck on what to get your loved ones for the holidays? As a tech reviewer, I get to play with all the best new gadgets before they hit store shelves, but I don't get to keep them. That means this time every year, I'm leaning over my laptop -- fingers twitching and crediting cards itching -- to buy a few of my favorites for myself or people I really, really like. Here's what I shelled out my very own money to buy this year. This is the year of voice-activated smart displays.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. If you've got your slippers on, coffee in hand, and aren't ready to face the crowds at massive stores like Walmart and Target today, we've got good news--all those great Black Friday deals are available from the comfort of your couch. The team at Reviewed has sorted through all their online offerings to bring you the best deals on the best products. Want to know about all the other Black Friday deals?

The best-selling gadget of 2018 will surely be the Apple iPhone, which historically has been the world's biggest-selling product, to the tune of over 200 million units yearly. But when we asked over 1,000 consumers to pick the top tech gadgets of 2018, the iPhone didn't even make the top 5. In an exclusive SurveyMonkey/Audience poll for USA TODAY, they picked the Samsung Galaxy S9 phone as their top pick for the year, at 13 percent. The S9, the successor to last year's S8, is notable for having a camera that can shoot in lower light than the iPhone, expandable memory for when all those photos and videos say "memory full" and the ability to shoot video in super slow motion. Tied for second place at 10 percent are the Amazon-branded Fire TV Edition televisions, which offer channel switching and other functionality via the Alexa personal assistant.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham takes a look at three new connected speakers that all have video features. Amazon has enlarged and enhanced its Echo Show device, which brings video to its line of smart speaker, Google counters with the Home Hub, adding video to the Home line of speakers, and Facebook is in there as well, with its controversial Portal video speaker. We've taken all for intensive test drives. Which one is for you? The Google speaker, ($149, on sale for $99 during Black Friday sales) is our all-around favorite of the trio because it does more than the others.

Google has unveiled its plan to put a smart device in every room of the home as part of its digital'ecosystem' that could be manipulated to eavesdrop on users. The tech giant's smart home concept, unveiled at a one-off event in San Francisco, showcased Google Assistant at its full potential. It combined speakers, smart plugs, voice controlled vacuums, smart displays and cameras throughout the house. Its digital ecosystem is designed to enable communication between rooms and family members - even if they are not at home. But experts are wary of the technology and have warned the gadgets have the potential to eavesdrop on confidential conversations in order to sell users new products.