While some voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant are duking it out for smart home dominance, there are others that focus on offering more specialized voice support. One such assistant is the new one being launched by Pandora today. Soon, everyone listening to Pandora on iOS and Android will be able to navigate the app, discover new music, and play songs using voice commands.
Functionality from Amazon's voice assistant Alexa was added to Razer Chroma this week. In the near future, users will be able to command the many combinations of colors and color functionality on their Razer Chroma light-embedded devices. This comes at the same time as the Razer Chroma Connected Devices program, now active, tags on 15 new parters and 300+ Chroma-enabled devices.
Samsung has yet to even release its Galaxy Home, a new smart speaker that combines the Bixby assistant with premium audio features, and we're already hearing rumors about a second model being in development. First announced in August, the Galaxy Home still doesn't have a set price or release date, but it seems like Samsung is working on a cheaper version for when that days does arrive.
Your family might have a question or two about Amazon's Alexa and/or a very inexpensive Echo device this holiday season. As such, we've compiled a list of 10 simple points that you might want to relay. This isn't a cheerleading list, and it's not the list you'll want if you're looking to convince your family that Echo devices and Alexa are a great idea. Then again, it's not all bad.
Samsung's own Bixby assistant has been around for a few years now, but it still trails far behind Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant in usage. This is due to a number of reasons, including poor performance and a lack of features, but also because of Alexa and Assistant's third-party support, which has resulted in widespread integration with other apps and services. It now looks like Samsung is ready to have Bixby take a stab at learning new skills too.
This week the folks at NVIDIA revealed their longest-lasting device in the history of the world, NVIDIA SHIELD, will get a Google Home update. This isn't the first time users were able to command their NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV device to do things. It's just the most major expansion of commands available on the NVIDIA SHIELD that work not only with the NVIDIA SHIELD, but with other Google Home voice command-capable devices.
If you're in the mood to combine your Amazon and Microsoft-made smart assistants on any one device, today's your day. Alexa can open Cortana and Cortana can open Alexa. Because there might be a very rare instance in which you want one or the other, this particular tie-in is live. It's just live in preview mode when this article is first published, but live nonetheless.
![Just 2% of Alexa users tried to buy stuff with voice in 2018 [UPDATE: Amazon Statement]](https://c.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/echo.jpg)
Sources this week suggested that Amazon's Alexa devices aren't working exactly the way they'd been expected to work with regard to other Amazon products. In the report, it's said that in the year 2018, (so far,) just 2% of users of Alexa products tried to purchase a product on Amazon with their voice. Of those that tried to make a purchase with Alexa, a whopping 90% never tried to buy another product with their voice through the service.
Everything these days seem to be driven by bots, specifically chatbots. That’s true whether they’re simply bots you type commands to or, more popularly, speak to. But despite the ubiquity and popularity of Google Assistant, our TVs, sometimes the first appliance to become smart in our houses, are still beholden to the decades-old remote control. If you own one of DISH’s Hopper family of receivers, that’s no longer true and you can take it easy even when you can’t find that elusive remote.
Amazon and Microsoft just combined forces officially, tag-teaming their personal assistants Alexa and Cortana through the future. These two voice-activated smart assistant overlord software and cloud intelligence systems will work together on devices of all sorts. In short, it would seem that Alexa is going to handle "personal" stuff while Cortana's going to handle all the "business."
Kinect is back, and it wants to make the Internet of Things smarter and less reliant on the cloud. Microsoft has taken the wraps off Project Kinect for Azure today at Build 2018, its annual developer event, and if you thought uses for the fiendishly clever depth-sensing camera began and ended with Xbox gaming, think again.
Apple's HomePod smart speaker released earlier this year with impressive audio quality and Apple Music integration, but there's no denying that the tech powering the device, Siri, still lags behind virtual assistant rivals like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. While Siri handles music playback requests with ease, it still struggles with general knowledge questions that the others have no problem with. It seems Apple is in a hurry to address this shortcoming, however, as indicated by a big increase in Siri-related hiring.