After flooding our homes with every Sonos model you can buy (and filling all remaining space with the boxes of said speakers), then using them for a couple of years, we've come to value their audio fidelity and ability to network seamlessly together. There isn't another speaker system that lets you string together multiple speakers as easily or connect them to stream in different rooms of your home while keeping the audio perfectly in sync. The closest thing may be Google Assistant speakers, and Sonos connects to that system as well. Easy streaming: The Sonos app supports almost every streaming service in existence, and many apps, like Spotify, let you stream to Sonos speakers within them. The Sonos ecosystem can also handle home-theater applications and can support a full surround-sound setup.

It's long been possible to say "Hey Google" to your Google smart speaker to request a playlist from, say, YouTube Music, Spotify, Pandora, and even Apple Music. But can you spot the major music service that's missing? Until now, Amazon Music had been conspicuously absent from the list of music streamers that Google Assistant could easily control on your Google Nest smart speaker or display. Recently, though, Google has begun changing its tune in regard to Amazon Music support on its Nest devices. As spotted by 9to5Google, Amazon Music can finally be set as a default music service on your Google smart speakers.

When we first reviewed Apple's HomePod mini in 2020, we had some reservations. While it was a much better value than the original HomePod, it still had some of the same limitations of its bigger sibling. Siri wasn't as bright as Alexa or Google Assistant, the HomeKit ecosystem was limited and there were no real alternatives to Apple Music for on-demand tunes. You bought a mini for Apple's tight integration, and not much else. Apple has significantly expanded the HomePod mini's functionality.

The Era 300 is the second in Sonos's next-generation line of wifi hi-fis, packing six speakers into one curvaceous box capable of immersing listeners in quality sound. The speaker costs £449 ($449/A$749) and sits above the new £249 Era 100, competing directly with Apple's HomePod and other high-end speakers – premium audio at a premium price. But where the Era 100 is a compact bookshelf speaker, the Era 300 is a different animal. It needs to sit out in the open to allow it to project music outwards from its front, sides and top to fill the room with sound. The cinched-in design allows a series of speakers to fire up and out to the sides from the back half of the Era 300, projecting sound all around the listener for full stereo and new spatial audio surround sound.

The Era 100 is the first of a brand new line of wifi speakers from multi-room audio specialists Sonos, taking what was good about its popular longstanding One series and adding more bass and stereo sound. With a similar aesthetic to the outgoing One, it is only 2cm taller and 1cm deeper, making it pretty compact and easy to place on a cabinet or bookshelf. It requires just a power cable, connecting to your router via wifi 6 for streaming music from more than 100 different services, including Spotify and BBC Sounds, controlled from the Sonos app on your phone. In a first for Sonos's non-portable speakers, it also supports Bluetooth 5 for impromptu streaming from guest's phones or other Bluetooth devices, which works great. A button on the top turns the voice assistant on or off.

When Amazon first introduced Alexa and the Echo speaker years ago, the idea of talking to a digital assistant wasn't totally novel. Both the iPhone and Android phones had semi-intelligent voice controls -- but with the Echo, Amazon took its first step toward making something like Alexa a constant presence in your home. Since then, Apple and Google have followed suit, and now there's a huge variety of smart speakers available at various price points. As the market exploded, the downsides of having a device that's always listening for a wake word have become increasingly apparent. They can get activated unintentionally, sending private recordings back to monolithic companies to analyze. And even at the best of times, giving more personal information to Amazon, Apple and Google can be a questionable decision.

Remember surround sound home theater & 3D TV? The promise was real but the technology was premature. Unlike my younger Millennial cohorts, I can remember a time before the Internet took off. Al Gore may have invented it (or not) before my lungs first cried "Hello, World!" but like all nascent technologies, the Internet took a while to develop & fan out. A few years before the awful sound of dial-up modems became commonplace, my first experience with this new thing called the Internet was at my mom's workplace - the local community college.

The second generation of Ikea's novel Sonos-powered wifi speaker lamp looks a little sleeker than the first, sounds a bit better and comes in new shapes, materials and colour combinations. The idea is the same as for the rest of the Symfonisk range: hide a speaker in a piece of stylish furniture. In true Ikea fashion, the £179 ($169) lamp comes flat-packed, although thankfully only in three parts: the base, the plug and the shade. The base of the lamp is an 18cm-wide fabric-covered cylinder, available in grey/white or black. The shade is available in either grey or black and in two styles: fabric, as photographed, or glass, similar to the lamp's predecessor.

The craze for blissful background music ideal for studying or chilling out to has spawned popular YouTube channels, streaming playlists and even AI-powered apps. AiMi -- which today is rolling out a major update for its generative music service -- sits squarely in the latter camp alongside peers Endel and Brain.fm. A little more than a year after its debut, the app for electronic music fans is launching a new interface that gives listeners six endless mixes to choose from. Their titles, including Serenity and Chill and Deep, give you an indication of the type of meditative, lo-fi and deep house beats on offer. So how does an AI-powered music app work? In AiMi's case, you hit play to listen to a feed of continuous music, including real tracks, generated by artificial intelligence.

HomePod owners have had the ability to use third-party music services for several months now, but thus far only Pandora directly works with Apple's smart speakers. However, that's changing today with the introduction of Deezer integration for the original (and since discontinued) HomePod and its replacement, the cheaper HomePod Mini. By launching and connecting the music streaming app with an Apple speaker, paying subscribers can tell Siri to play specific tracks, artists, albums, favorites or playlists. To keep things succinct, you can set Deezer as your default music service in iOS. That way you don't have to ask Siri to play a song or artist "on Deezer" at the end of every command.