All the smart home news, reviews, and gadgets you need to know about | The Verge

The smart home holds so much promise. It can make life more convenient with lights that turn on as you walk in a room, doors that unlock as you approach, and robots that clean your floors. It can also make your home safer, more energy efficient, and even a little more fun. (Have you tried asking Alexa to beam you up?)
But for all its benefits, the smart home can be complicated, confusing, and occasionally maddening. It’s also hard to keep up with all the changes. New gadgets are arriving daily, new features come to old products, and there are so many different ways to turn on a smart light bulb.
If you need a guide, that’s what I’m here for.
Here, I’ll be posting the latest smart home reviews, guides, news, and opinions on everything happening in the connected home. Follow this page to stay updated on what Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Google, and Home Assistant and the rest are doing with their smart home platforms. I’ll keep you in the loop on all the newest technologies — including Matter, Thread, Sidewalk, UWB — as well as the old favorites. And, of course, I’ll cover all the news on the latest gadgets and the biggest releases around tech for your home.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
The HomeView nails everything I want from a smart display. It’s superb at controlling my smart home; it’s an excellent hands-free kitchen companion, a good speaker, and a gorgeous digital photo frame. It’s also the first Apple smart speaker with Siri AI, which is an improvement, if still slow at times. But Apple has fallen into the trap that hampers other smart displays I’ve tested: Not content with doing its core functions well, it tries to do more, and that’s where the friction creeps in.
The special Apple sauce here is that HomeView is both a smart display everyone in your home can use and an extension of your iPhone or iPad, providing access to your texts, calendar, and reminders when your phone is at home and on the same Wi-Fi network. This makes it a communal device with personal data, and switching between the two is where HomeView stumbles. Clunky authentication checks and being sent to my iPhone too many times interrupt the hands-free experience. Not to mention that I could easily read my 15-year-old daughter’s text messages, and vice versa.
Nabu Casa — the commercial side of the Open Home Foundation, which runs Home Assistant — just launched the Home Assistant Connect Aux-2, a multi-function box designed to help you bring more non-smart devices into your smart home. It’s part of Home Assistant’s ongoing efforts to become more user-friendly. And it’s working.
I’ve been testing the Aux-2 for a couple days and I’ve found it unsurprisingly useful and surprisingly easy to set up. The Aux-2 is a $69 box about the size of a deck of cards. It has 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB-A, USB-C, a digital/analog audio jack, a Grove port for interfacing with peripherals like sensors, buttons, and LEDs, and a pair of RS-232 serial ports.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Ring is finally shipping a flying indoor drone camera. For real this time. The Ring Drone Cam will arrive on January 27th, 2027, for $249.99, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said at a launch event in New York City this week. If it does actually ship, it will arrive almost six years after the company announced its first flying camera, the Ring Always Home Cam.
Designed to patrol inside your home when you’re not there, the Drone Cam is an AI-powered drone that can react to triggers from Ring sensors, such as detecting motion, a door opening, a water leak, or an alarm sounding. When triggered, it flies along preprogrammed routes to a set location, where it can livestream and record what’s happening in the Ring app.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Around 7PM each weeknight, I find myself standing in front of the fridge, trying to decide on something for dinner that won’t make my husband complain, “Chicken again?” Yes, I should meal plan more, but I don’t, so this is where I’m at. A nightly battle in which the chicken usually wins.
Recently, my best weapon in this fight has been AI. Between Alexa Plus in the Echo smart display on my kitchen counter, the Samsung Food app on my fridge, and even an AI-powered cooking robot, AI has become my go-to sous chef — albeit one I need to keep a close eye on. It’s helped me swap ingredients, generate ideas, fix things when I mess up, and yes, even cook better. So I was intrigued when my go-to recipe app, NYT Cooking, introduced an AI assistant.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Three years ago, I wrote an obituary for the smart display. The category — smart speakers with touchscreens attached — was stuck with a few underpowered gadgets from Google and Amazon that tried to do too much and did too little well. Back then, I also laid out what they needed to do to improve. This month, Apple and Amazon launched new smart displays that check nearly every box on that list.
Based on my brief hands-on time with Apple’s first smart display, the $299 HomeView, and Amazon’s $499.99 Echo Show 16, a ground-up rebuild of its smart display line, these could finally turn the smart display into what it should have been all along: the family computer. Not a place to do homework or pay the bills, but a shared screen the whole household can use to check the calendar, see who’s at the door, and figure out what’s for dinner.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Matic, the company behind my favorite robot vacuum, is launching its first new model since its 2023 debut: the Matic Serene. The new robotic floor cleaner has one key upgrade: noise reduction. With a promised output of just 52 decibels at its highest suction level, the Serene claims to be about as quiet as a running refrigerator. It costs $1,695, $200 more than the original Matic’s current price, and is available now. The good news is the company is offering an upgrade path for existing Matic owners.
The Serene targets people “who are extremely noise sensitive,” cofounder and president Mehul Nariyawala tells The Verge. But beyon