You needn’t live in a smart home to benefit from a smart speaker. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and other digital assistants can help you in dozens of ways, and you don’t have to lift a finger to summon them—just speak their names. If you already know you want a smart speaker, scroll down for our top recommendations.
But consider your decision carefully. In a perfect world, these devices would be interoperable, so you could buy one brand because it’s better for music, another brand because it’s the best for smart home control, and a third because it’s superior for retrieving general information from the internet. That’s not how it works in the real world. Once you commit to one platform, you’ll want to stick with it.
On the upside, choosing one brand of smart speaker over another generally won’t tie you into that brand’s entire ecosystem. Buying an Amazon Echo, for instance, won’t limit you to subscribing to Amazon’s music services—you can also use it with Spotify, Pandora, SiriusXM radio, and several other services. And even if you have a smart home system from one company, you can control smart home products that would be otherwise incompatible with that system with voice commands—provided they’re compatible with your digital assistant of choice.
Updated September 18, 2019 to add our opinion of the new indoor/outdoor Sonos Move smart speaker. It’s heavy and a bit expensive, but we consider it a smashing success in Sonos’ effort to expand its multi-room audio mission to include spaces outside the home.
Michael Brown / IDG
An increasing number of soundbars double as smart speakers. The Sonos Beam is powered by Amazon’s Alexa now, but the company promises to add Google Assistant support before the end of 2018.
That said, if you’re wedded to Google Play Music, streaming music from your account to an Amazon Echo is not perfectly seamless (the same goes for streaming music from Amazon’s services to a Google Home). And there are some major coexistence exceptions: Google is currently blocking its YouTube videos from appearing on the Echo Show and Echo Spot devices, for instance (although you can get there using a web browser on the second-generation Echo Show), and Apple’s HomePod will stream music only from Apple Music. If you plan to mix and match third-party products with your smart speaker, do the research to make sure they’ll work together.
If you want to know more about what smart speakers can do in general before you pick one, skip down to the “What can smart speakers do?” section.
Rob Schultz / IDG
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