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

Smart speakers have spent the past few years searching for a compelling second act. Beyond music, timers, and controlling your lights, they’ve struggled to justify taking up space on the kitchen counter. AI promised to change that.

Amazon debuted its new hardware powered by a revamped Alexa last fall, and now it’s finally Google’s turn. The Google Home Speaker is the company’s first new smart speaker in six years and its first “built for Gemini.” After years of neglect, Google appears to be finally getting serious about the smart home — again. The new speaker is the clearest sign yet. Gemini for Home, however, still feels unfinished.

Four years ago, overlooking a canal in Amsterdam, the smart home industry collectively launched Matter, the one interoperability standard to rule them all. Heralded as the solution to the industry’s struggles, Matter was built on open standards and existing technologies and is the result of years of collaboration between traditional rivals, including Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung.

Matter promised an end to walled gardens and ecosystem lock-in. It promised to make a smart home device, like a lock, lightbulb, or sensor, easy to buy and set up. It promised you could choose any brand, use any platform, no expertise required — it would just work.

Assa Abloy has laid off the majority of staff at Level Home, the smart lock company known for building smart tech into traditional-looking deadbolts, and is folding the business into Kwikset, according to a source familiar with the decision.

The Verge obtained exclusive details from a person familiar with the restructuring who requested anonymity as they were part of the layoffs. They shared an audio recording of a meeting in which Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, head of North American HR, informed the staff that their positions had been eliminated, effective immediately, as “a part of a larger restructuring of the Level business.” A LinkedIn post from a now-former employee corroborates the layoffs.

Smart lighting company Philips Hue has launched its first wired wall modules. Installed behind existing wall switches, the new devices bring non-smart lights into the Hue ecosystem for the first time. Hue also announced new Play table and floor lamps that are more affordable versions of its Signe series, along with upgrades to its E14 candle bulbs that add a broader white light spectrum and Matter-over-Thread compatibility.

The new lights are now available globally; however, the Wired Wall Switch Modules are Europe-only. Signify CTO George Yianni told The Verge that there are currently no plans to launch them in the US, but the company would consider doing so if there’s enough interest. “DIY modules are not such an established category in the US; it’s more fully integrated switches,” he said. “If people really want these in the US, then maybe we’ll look at it. I think the modules are quite exciting; it’s something that we’ve talked about doing for a long time.”

Google’s first new smart speaker in six years starts shipping on June 25th, narrowly missing its promised spring launch window. Preorders for the Google Home Speaker open today, June 17th.

Nothing has changed hardware-wise in the nine months since the $99 speaker was announced. It has the same slightly squished round design, with touch-capacitive buttons on top and a light ring at the bottom to indicate status. And it still comes in four colors: porcelain (white), hazel (black), jade (green), and berry (red). The last two are US-only.

Matter, the smart home interoperability standard, might finally get a feature that should have been there from day one: a single shared Matter network managed by multiple ecosystems. With this feature, called Joint Fabric, smart devices added to the network will be controllable by any authorized platform — Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and the rest. No need to “share” your smart light between apps; set it up once, and control it everywhere. It’s like your smart home is a joint bank account and your platforms of choice all have signing authority.

Joint Fabric is part of the new Matter 1.6 spec announced this week at Unify, the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s inaugural conference, in Austin, Texas. While there are no new device types in the spec, there are a few quality-of-life updates.

Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service is getting in on the Apple Intelligence party to bring more descriptive alerts from your connected cameras and let you search footage using natural language. The Apple Home app is also getting better notifications powered by AI and is finally adding support for energy reporting.

These improvements were announced at WWDC last week and will be publicly available this fall. I’ve been playing with some of the features in the developer betas for iOS 27 and tvOS 27 for a few days, and based on my first impressions, Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video is much improved — enough to put it back in contention for me as a home security system.

Apple and Google are updating their smart home streaming devices to Thread 1.4. As first spotted by Matter Alpha and 9to5 Google, the latest spec has arrived on compatible Apple TVs in the tvOS 27 developer beta and the Google TV Streamer through a software update.

This lays the groundwork for these devices, which serve as Thread Border Routers, to implement Thread credential sharing, enabling them to connect more easily to an existing Thread network rather than creating their own.

I’ve been a fan of Philips Hue smart lights since the early days. It’s one of the few staples in my ever-changing smart home. However, when the Bridge Pro launched late last year, it wasn’t immediately obvious why I should upgrade. The signature feature, MotionAware — which turns your lights into motion sensors — is neat, but I already have motion sensors. While I run two of Hue’s standard bridges to accommodate all my lights and accessories, I’m not at a point where I need the Pro’s higher device capacity. I like the idea of faster response times thanks to the advanced processing power, but that wasn’t quite enough.

Then in April, SpatialAware arrived. This maps the location of lights in a room to distribute the colors and tones of Hue’s lighting scenes across them more intelligently. Suddenly, my existing smart lights felt new again. While MotionAware was the headline feature when the Pro launched, it’s SpatialAware that finally sold me on upgrading.

Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been acquired by OneRobotics, the parent company of SwitchBot. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Nanoleaf CEO Gimmy Chu says the company will remain independent and that he and his cofounder and COO, Christian Yan, will continue to run it. “Nothing is changing operationally,” says Chu, adding that there are plans for product integrations between the two smart home companies.

The sale, which Chu characterized as “more of a merger,” will provide Nanoleaf with significant resources, including a cash infusion that will, among other things, help the company grow its team at its Toronto headquarters. It will also bring access to the manufacturing facilities and supply chain of the Chinese company, which has a market cap of over $2 billion. “This will enable us to make things at a larger scale, with bigger purchasing power to bring down costs for our customers and have tighter control over the supply chain and quality control,” says Chu.

Thermacell has launched Liv 2.0, the next generation of its Wi-Fi-connected smart mosquito protection system. It features new hardware and can cover a larger area, and Thermacell says its formula can now deter no-see-ums. But it’s also more expensive and requires professional installation.

Liv 2.0 uses the same setup as the original Liv — a central hub with a wired repeller system containing its metofluthrin-based repellent — but it features entirely new hardware. Pricing starts at about $1,746 for a system with three repellers, a six-pack of repellent refills, and coverage of up to 900 square feet. That’s twice as much as the original, which started at $699 and covered about 945 square feet.

Since moving to South Carolina’s Lowcountry, I’ve been spellbound by the myriad of beautiful birds that share the coast with us — ospreys raising their babies in towering nests beside the road to my daughter’s school, roseate spoonbills wading in the marsh on my morning walks, eagles circling over my son’s tennis matches, and a constant parade of songbirds through my backyard. The challenge, as every birder knows, lies in catching these moments. And for that, a smart bird feeder is a fabulous tool.

These use a small, motion-activated camera embedded in a feeder to capture photos and video of birds visiting your backyard, which you can watch in an app on your phone. Most offer AI-powered bird identification, presenting the species along with a cute clip. No more standing motionless with binos on your porch, balancing a Sibley Guide; the bird life comes directly to you. It’s basically OnlyFans for twitchers.

Selling the smart home has been hard. Even Amazon has lost money in the space, despite putting hundreds of millions of Echo devices in people’s homes. Google has also reportedly struggled to turn a profit from its substantial investment in Nest. But now Google is seeing dollar signs in the prospect of selling AI-driven subscriptions in the smart home. And it’s not alone.

At Google I/O this week, Google announced it’s expanding its Gemini for Home APIs to allow companies to integrate more of its Gemini-powered smart home features into their own apps. In a blog post, Google’s Ravi Akella, director of product management for the Home Platform, said this will enable “service providers and hardware manufacturers to build monetizable, proactive services that care for users and their homes.”

Welcome! I’m The Verge’s smart home reviewer, and I’m hosting an exclusive subscriber AMA today at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. I test a lot of connected gadgets for my job, but the dominant device in my home — by both number and square footage covered — is the robot vacuum. At any given time, I have a dozen of these bots bouncing around, sweeping and mopping my floors and irritating my cats.

I just published a guide on how to choose the best robot vacuum for your home, and I recently reviewed the Dyson Spot & Scrub, Shark’s Power Detect, and the Matic, which is the most interesting new approach to a robot vacuum I’ve seen in my 7 years of reviewing these machines.