Accept your fate: You can't escape the smart home

Yes, Alexa is everywhere. You have only to look at our CES 2017 Smart Home Scoreboard to see how Amazon has married its virtual assistant to cars, refrigerators, televisions and robots.

Alexa's momentum isn't surprising given the amount of hype over the last year. For Alexa's competition, Google Assistant is still new as a smart home assistant, and Apple is sticking to its slow-burn approach to growing Siri and its iOS HomeKit platform. That's why our Scoreboard has a loose quality breakdown. I didn't want to simply hand Amazon a prize for supporting yet another smart plug.

CES 2017: The final word

Fifty years from now, the CES show floor may be some hybrid of the real and virtual world, as telepresence minidrones hover and swoop through the aisles, beaming the scene back to our VR contact lenses. But in 2017, the 50th anniversary show was something that would've been an equally unrealistic sci-fi vision to attendees of the first electronics exhibition in 1967: wall-sized TVs as thin as a house key. Electric cars that can drive themselves. Tiny robots that stand guard in your home. And an entire house that you can control with your voice. All of them real, touchable and available to home consumers soon, if not already.

 

Crowd Forms on Alexa Bandwagon

New additions to Amazon's growing ecosystem of Alexa-based products are making a splash at CES this week. With a growing number of home appliance, computer and electronics makers announcing integrations with the company's digital assistant technology, the transformation to automated homes and home offices appears to be taking place before our eyes.