How about a good, old-fashioned technology arms race?
You could just buy a smart light bulb set, but for a lot of consumers (reportedly more than 5 million of you, as of November 2016), it’s Amazon ’s voice-activated Alexa that will be the entry point for controlling devices around your home.
Along with Amazon, Apple continues to grow its Siri-powered HomeKit smart home system. Google has also entered the fray with its own blandly named smart home AI, Google Assistant, which featured prominently in Google’s Echo-imitating Google Home speaker in November 2016.
The scoreboard captures both quantity and quality of new devices, the latter based on the importance of each announcement to its respective platform.
