An AI-powered smart home voice assistant that amiably chats with you, follows your orders with ease, and does your bidding in the background? It's a tantalizing idea that seems so close, yet remains stubbornly far away. The big prediction last year was that a new Apple smart hub powered by an AI-augmented Siri would arrive by spring 2025--right around now--complete with a touchscreen and smart home controls. It was a device that would vault Apple back into the smart home game. And then there was Google, which had begun testing Gemini on its Nest smart speakers late last year, allowing a small subset of its users to chat with the powerful AI model when asking more complex questions.

Looking forward to using Siri and HomeKit to control your robot vacuum? Your wait just got a little longer. An edit to a teeny-tiny footnote at the bottom of the Apple Home product page indicates that robot vacuum support for HomeKit has been pushed back into "early 2025," as noted by Macrumors. During its annual developer's conference in June, Apple promised that HomeKit, Siri, and the Apple Home app would gain the ability to work with robot vacuums this year, and many expected the feature to debut with the expected iOS 18.2 release later in December. It's not clear why Apple chose to put off the vacuum functionality, but assuming there are no more delays, smart home users won't have to wait too much longer for the update.

The new $130 Echo Show 8 takes the top rank as the greatest Alexa smart display, with the Echo Show 10 being more novelty than necessity (that revolving screen doesn't support the $250 price tag). The second iteration of Amazon's mid-sized smart speaker with a display, which was released this month, combines some of the greatest features from the Show 10 (13-megapixel camera, digital zoom, and security camera functions) and compresses them into a more manageable size. The Echo Show 8 has a small enough footprint to sit on a bedside table or a kitchen counter. The Show 8 (available in Charcoal and Glacier White) offers the most bang (and screen size) for your buck, with a virtually identical design to its predecessor (same display, same speakers), but with a bit more behind the hood, including a new octo-core processing and a beefed-up camera. You can still watch shows, listen to music, control your smart home, send out announcements to your family, and check in on friends and family, but you can now zoom with a 13-megapixel camera.

Amazon's latest Echo Show 5 Alexa smart display is smaller, cheaper and has improved privacy, but is a £79.99 5.5in screen with a camera ready to replace your alarm clock in the bedroom? The Show 5 isn't the first Alexa smart display aimed at being your bedside clock. The Echo Spot, with its pleasingly round screen and ball-like shape, was released in 2018 and is still available for £120. While the Show 5 is not cute like the Spot, its rectangular shape makes it more practical for displaying content, even if it takes up a third more horizontal space on your bedside table. The new Alexa display looks like Amazon's 10.1in Echo Show hit with a shrink ray, replete with a fabric-covered back that is reminiscent of pre-flatscreen tube televisions.

For one, it has all the smarts of the Google Assistant built into its interface, so you can ask it questions, play games, set reminders, broadcast messages, and access smart home controls with your voice. And with a 7-inch display, it's also much smaller than some of the other smart displays that have come out in recent months, so it fits into tight corners or on narrow countertops much better than its 8- or 10-inch counterparts. But it's the Home Hub's abilities as a digital photo frame that makes it so appealing to me. Digital photo frames were all the rage a decade ago, though they were often fussy to set up and maintain. You'd have to either tether it to your computer with a USB cable to transfer over files or load up an SD Card whenever you wanted to add or change the images on display.

Price: £89.99Amazon's second-generation Echo is a revamped version of the device that invented the whole category of smart speakers in 2014. The new Echo is smaller, better sounding and better looking, in a choice of fabric or wood finishes. What makes the Echo great is Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa. A ring of seven microphones in the top listens out for your choice of wake word – the default is simply "Alexa" – before sending what you say to Amazon's servers for interpretation. Alexa can almost always hear you including over music noise as loud as an extractor fan and from pretty far away.

The firm's latest Alexa-powered addition to its Echo range adds a clock and touchscreen interface to the mix Mon 5 Feb 2018 04.00 EST Last modified on Mon 5 Feb 2018 04.02 EST Amazon's new Echo Spot is one of the most novel takes on a smart speaker yet, and while it is certainly more than just a smart clock, that's what it's best at – an attractive voice-assisted smart desk or bedside-table accessory. The Echo Spot is to the Echo Show what the Echo Dot is to the original Amazon Echo. That is to say, it can do everything the Echo Show can just in a smaller, cheaper ball-shaped device with a circular screen. That includes playing music, answering questions and showing the weather, video from cameras and the like. The Echo Spot is the first of Amazon's small army of voice-assistant speakers that can really be considered cute-looking. The 91mm-tall little black or white ball looks incredibly modern with just three buttons on the top and a crisp-looking 2.5in circular screen on the front.

This demo shows how to control a Smart Home using IBM Watson and Augmented Reality technologies.

At Google I/O last May, the tech giant announced its own voice-powered hub to rival Amazon's Echo: the Home, which would be powered by their AI helper, Assistant. The Siri-like software was promoted as a standard feature on the search titan's first phone, the Pixel, which came out later in fall. But Google announced a plan weeks ago to bring the hub and the help back together, promising to bring some of Home's connected device control to the company's smartphone line. Today, they started rolling out Home Control for some versions of their mobile platform, allowing users to use voice commands to fiddle with their network of connected home devices. It's a little unclear which software can access the feature: 9to5Google and AndroidPolice got it working on Pixel phones running Android 7.1.2,