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Chronicle Staff and News Services Updated 5:16 pm, Tuesday, January 24, 2017 Photo: PARAMOUNT PICTURES Image 1of/1 Caption Close Image 1 of 1 Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: Nemesis” Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: Nemesis” Photo: PARAMOUNT PICTURES Beer on the moon, Star Trek in your Echo, $100M […]

Ninety-nine percent of appliances and devices in the home are not connected. Today, you have no idea if the HVAC is working efficiently, let alone if it is about to breakdown. Ditto for your hot water heater, washer, dryer, dishwasher, etc. The failure of any one of these appliances is a major inconvenience and significant

Since Home arrived a few months ago, Google has been regularly adding new features to the compact speaker and its virtual assistant. Today, the company announced that the connected device can now be used to control smart home gadgets from Belkin’s WeMo line and Honeywell. This adds more options for controlling lights, switches, thermostats and

The future of smart devices is in the home, and increasingly Americans are turning to Amazon as a source for those devices. More than 8 million Americans now have an Amazon Echo device, with the number of Echo households tripling in the past quarter, according to a new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Awareness

Google was a bit late to the connected home party. Its Amazon Echo competitor, Home, officially launched in November of last year, and slowly but surely, the company has been adding some key partners to help expand its reach. Last year, Nest, Philips Hue and Samsung SmartThings all were added to Google’s burgeoning connected home ecosystem, and

The Honeywell Lyric. Chris Monroe/CNET “Hey Google, turn up the temperature.” If you have the always-listening Google Home on your countertop, you now have more options if you want to make your home smarter. Previously, you could talk to the Google Home and adjust the temperature with the Nest Learning Thermostat. Now, the Google Assistant

 Apple’s 2017 iPhone models will likely ship with an enhanced version of Siri, reflecting growing competition in the AI assistant space, a report said on Tuesday. The exact features Apple has planned are unknown, though the company did buy machine learning startup Turi in August, DigiTimes noted, citing market sources for the iPhone plans. In

But you still can’t order tea, earl grey, hot Unlike Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and the Google Assistant, Amazon has allowed users to change the ‘wake word’ for its Alexa voice-enabled assistant ever since the company launched its Echo smart speaker. A multi-syllabic word or phrase that computers, smartphones, and other devices listen for, a

If you’re an absent-minded smartphone owner, here’s a good reason to get an Amazon Echo. TrackR just updated an app that promises to find your misplaced (or stolen) phone no matter what (or where). The new app runs on Alexa, the voice-controled virtual assistant that runs on Amazon Echo. TrackR’s first release, as shown in