Sonos devices have supported Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant for almost five years now. The Sonos One from 2017 was the first speaker the company made with built-in microphones, and almost every speaker it’s made since has worked with Alexa, not to mention Google Assistant. Despite supporting those popular services, though, Sonos has decided to build its own voice assistant. Dubbed Sonos Voice Control, the feature is specifically designed to work with music only, so this isn’t exactly a competitor to Alexa and Google Assistant. Instead, it’s meant to control your music as quickly as possible, and with privacy in mind. 

Oh yeah, and it's voiced by none other than Giancarlo Esposito. 

Sonos

Sonos Voice Control will be available on every Sonos speaker that has a microphone, going all the way back to the first-generation Sonos One. Like other voice assistants, you use a wake phrase (Hey Sonos) to get the speaker’s attention. From there, you can ask it to play songs, albums or artists from Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer or Pandora. You can also ask it to play stations from Sonos Radio. Nope, Spotify and YouTube Music aren’t available right now, though Sonos says it plans to add more services in the future. 

As I alluded to earlier, Sonos Voice Control isn’t a full-fledged Alexa competitor. You can’t ask it for the weather or to add items to your to-do list; instead, it’s specifically tailored for music and controlling your Sonos system. That means you can ask Sonos to move music you’re playing from one speaker to another, or to play on all the connected speakers in your house. Simple commands like volume and skipping tracks work, as well. 

Those limited commands, plus play and pause controls, will even work on Bluetooth speakers like the Roam and Move when they’re not connected to WiFi. Sonos also promises that setup will be a simple matter of turning on the feature in the Sonos app – since you’re not connecting to a third-party system, you don’t have to bounce between multiple apps to get things working here. 

You may be wondering why you’d use Sonos Voice Control over one of the other voice assistants that work with its speakers. The company thinks privacy will be a big selling point here, as it cites research that a lot of people who don’t set up voice commands on Sonos speakers do so because of privacy concerns. But Sonos Voice Control gets around that by doing everything on-device – the company was explicit about this in a press conference, saying that no voice commands are saved or sent off the device back to Sonos. 

This has another benefit: Sonos Voice Control is fast. Most of the time, there’s no need for the speaker to verbally respond to your query, so you just ask it to play a song and the song plays. Obviously, we’ll need to do more testing with the software’s final version, but in a demo I saw earlier this week, the performance was extremely impressive. When I ask smart speakers to play music, there’s usually a noticeable pause as the speaker pings the internet and starts streaming music. Most of the time, the assistant also repeats what you asked for before it starts playing. But with Sonos Voice Assistant, there’s no verbal response, and the time it takes to process and understand commands seems to be much faster than when I use Google Assistant or Alexa on my Sonos speakers. In my unscientific testing, Alexa is definitely faster than Google Assistant for most queries, but the Sonos assistant seemed faster still.

If you’re already using Alexa on your Sonos speakers, you can add the Sonos Voice Assistant to work alongside Alexa. You can use the “Hey Sonos” wake phrase to control your music and still ask Alexa to do all the things it can do. Unfortunately, though, that’s not the case with Google Assistant; you can only use Google’s voice commands or Sonos, not both. In the past Sonos has alluded to Google being the reason that you couldn’t use both Alexa and the Google Assistant on its speakers, and that appears to be the case here, too.

As for how Sonos landed on Giancarlo Esposito for their voice assistant, the company says it considered numerous different options, including computer-generated male, female and gender-neutral options. But ultimately, the company wanted to go with a voice that would be familiar to many users – one that had more personality than you’d get from a generic voice. That said, you don’t hear Esposito talk too much, as the system is designed to talk back to you only when you directly ask it for information, like what song is playing. Sonos says it will add more voices over time as Voice Control arrives in more regions, but a company spokesperson declined to say whether they would come from well-known actors like Esposito. 

Sonos Voice Control is set to arrive in the US on June 1st, followed by France later this year. 

Once in a blue moon, Sonos releases its speakers in some fun colors or finishes, but most of the time, people just have to pick between black and white. But starting today, you can get the portable Sonos Roam in three new shades; Wave, Sunset and Olive. As you might guess, Wave is a chill shade of light blue, Sunset straddles the line between orange and pink and olive is a cactus sort of green. 

Aside from these colors, there's nothing else new with the $179 speaker — it has a built-in battery for about 10 hours of play time, Bluetooth for when you're away from WiFi, a microphone for voice commands via Alexa and Google Assistant and auto Trueplay technology to tune the speaker for optimal sound wherever you place it. I really liked the speaker when I reviewed it last year, and even though it costs $10 more than it did when it launched, I still think it's a great portable speaker that is a smart addition if you're already using other Sonos products.

There will be one new features for the Roam on June 1st, though. The speaker is one of many in the Sonos portfolio that'll work with the just-announced Sonos Voice Command platform. It's the company's own voice assistant that's specifically focused on controlling your speakers with speed and privacy top of mind. You can read more about that here, and you can order the Roam in these new colors today at the Sonos website.

Sonos products have never been cheap; in fact, the company raised prices on most of them last year. But Sonos has also recently released some products that push things into more affordable territory. Last year, the company released the $179 portable Sonos Roam speaker, and later followed up with a microphone-free version for $159, the cheapest Sonos yet. Home theater speakers, however, have remained premium products, with the $449 Beam being the cheapest soundbar option the company makes.

That changes today with the Ray, Sonos’ most compact and inexpensive soundbar, which arrives June 7th. At $279, it’s not competing on price with bargain options like Roku’s $130 Streambar. But in an advance demo earlier this week, it was clear that the Ray is a powerful soundbar that will provide a massive upgrade over just about any TV’s built-in speakers. Sonos made a few compromises to hit that $279 price point, but I think for a lot of people, it will make more sense than spending $449 on the Beam.

Like other Sonos speakers, the Ray connects to WiFi so you can stream audio to it from a range of popular services. You can group it with other Sonos speakers for multi-room playback and send songs to it via AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect. Since it’s a soundbar, it connects to your TV with an optical cable to play whatever audio is coming through your television. And, like other Sonos soundbars, you can wirelessly pair the Ray with the Sonos Sub for extra bass, or a pair of Sonos One speakers for true rear surround sound. This last point makes it an ideal entry point into a Sonos home theater system that you can build up over time.

Sonos

To keep the price below $300, Sonos made some changes that it believes won’t be a major concern to its target audience. Since the Ray uses optical audio rather than HDMI, it has less audio bandwidth than the Beam and Arc soundbars. This means that the Ray is only capable of decoding Stereo PCM, Dolby Digital and DTS Digital Surround; it’s incompatible with Dolby Atmos, a major difference from Sonos’ other home theater products. It does keep an ethernet port for faster networking performance, though.

Sonos also skipped out on including a microphone here, so you can’t use it directly with the new Sonos Voice Control feature or other assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant. In addition, the Ray has simpler speaker internals than what you’ll find on the Beam and Arc. All told, you get two center midwoofers, two tweeters with split waveguides to broaden the speaker’s soundstage, a bass reflex system that provides a surprising amount of low-end performance, and four Class-D amplifiers.

Sonos

The speaker has a tapered design and forward-facing speaker components, unlike the Beam and Arc. Sonos says this is so you can tuck the Ray inside of a media stand without sound bouncing off the walls. This is part of the overall vision for a product built for smaller spaces than other Sonos soundbars, which are both large and loud. (As usual with Sonos products, it comes in both black and white, either of which should look just fine in a wide variety of homes.)

Naturally, the Ray’s speaker setup is more modest than more expensive Sonos speakers, but in practice it still provides an impressively well-balanced listening experience, whether it be music or movies. Sonos said that it focused on areas where it felt built-in TV speakers were particularly lacking, like dialog reproduction and bass. Both of those characteristics were definitely noticeable in the demo. Naturally, we’ll need to do some closer listening to see how it compares to other soundbars from Sonos as well as its competitors, but the Ray made a positive first impression. Like other Sonos speakers, too, you can use an iOS device to enable Trueplay speaker-tuning technology to optimize the Ray’s sound for your specific environment.

At first glance, it seems the Ray offers a lot of value for $279. In some ways, Sonos is positioning it as the “gateway drug” for its home theater lineup, similar to how the Roam serves as an entry into the Sonos ecosystem. Like the Roam, the Ray costs more than some competing products, but that cost gets you a full-fledged Sonos device with all the benefits that entails, including a focus on audio quality. You could definitely get a less expensive soundbar, but Sonos isn’t trying to be the cheapest by any means necessary. Instead, it’s trying to bring the power and clarity of its other soundbars to a smaller, more affordable package. How successful it’ll be remains to be seen, but at first listen the Ray could attract a lot of people interested in something like the Sonos Beam, but who were otherwise scared off by its price.

A lone electric scooter sits abandoned on a busy sidewalk. It’s an all too frequent sight in cities around the world and one of the primary reasons local governments have been resistant to partnering with companies like Spin to bring micromobility services to their communities. But with the help of Google and the company’s new ARCore Geospatial API, Bird believes it has a solution to the problem. With its new Visual Parking System technology, Bird claims it’s developed a way to locate parked scooters with pinpoint accuracy.

The next time you use a Bird scooter in a city where the company supports VPS, its app will prompt you to use your phone’s camera to scan the surrounding area. The software will then compare your images against a Google database that includes photos from Street View. When you need to park your scooter, an augmented reality interface will help you do so in the right spot. Bird says the technology will allow it to reward riders who show good parking behavior more easily.

“The end result is cleaner sidewalks, more organized parking and better functioning micromobility programs thanks to the world’s first scalable, hyper-accurate, virtual parking system,” the company says of VPS. Bird is currently testing the technology in New York City, San Francisco and San Diego. It will expand the availability of VPS to more cities in the coming weeks and months.

As you might imagine, Bird isn’t the only company trying to solve the problem of inconsiderate customers parking their rental scooters in all the wrong places. Most of the companies in the space, including Ford-owned Spin and Europe’s Voi, have announced their own proposed solutions to the problems. But many of those rely on AI and remote piloting. Bird’s tool would appear to offer something different with an approach that rewards customers for being considerate of the public and other users.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

The privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo has updated its Chrome extension to block two new ad targeting methods that are a part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. In a blog post, DuckDuckGo informed users that they can block Google Topics and FLEDGE via its extension, or just disable the “Privacy Sandbox” setting in Chrome. The search giant’s Privacy Sandbox initiative — its alternative method of tracking and targeting users for online ads that Google argues is more privacy-focused — has been met with scrutiny by regulators and privacy advocates. DuckDuckGo has joined the chorus criticizing Google’s new ad tech, which the search giant is currently testing on a limited number of users.

“While some suggest that Topics is a less invasive way of ad targeting, we don't agree. Why not? Fundamentally it’s because, by default, Google Chrome will still be automatically surveilling your online activity and sharing information about you with advertisers and other parties so they can behaviorally target you without your consent,” wrote DuckDuckGo’s product director Peter Dolanjski in the post.

The company also called out Google’s FLEDGE (short for First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment), its new method of ad re-targeting (otherwise known as those obnoxious ads that follow users wherever they go on the web). Unlike older methods, Google claims that FLEDGE allows for re-marketing with relying on a personal identifier about users. FLEDGE will also be directly baked in Google’s Chrome browser, instead of traditional ad re-targetting which occurs through third-party cookies.

“When you visit a website where the advertiser may want to later follow you with an ad, the advertiser can tell your Chrome browser to put you into an interest group. Then, when you visit another website which displays ads, your Chrome browser will run an ad auction based on your interest groups and target specific ads at you. So much for your browser working for you!,” wrote Dolanjski.

It’s possibly just lip service, but Google has emphasized that it’s accepting feedback from privacy advocates and regulators as it continues to test Privacy Sandbox. UK’s competition watchdog gave Privacy Sandbox a cautious stamp of approval earlier this year. Phasing out third-party cookies has taken Google longer than expected. Google has regularly updated its Privacy Sandbox timeline, and the new estimate is that it will gradually stop supporting third-party cookies over a three-month period in late 2023.

While flagship phones continue to be expensive, many phone manufacturers now offer mid-range options that are far more affordable. Today, Google announced the Pixel 6a, the latest of its "a" line of phones that are designed to fit that need. It looks and feels a lot like the Pixel 6, but it has a smaller footprint roughly the size of the Pixel 5 and a smaller display. It also has the same 5G as the 6 and the 6 Pro, Titan M2 security, and the same Tensor SoC as the P6 Pro. But it's certainly not the only mid-range handset on the market. Here, we've compared it with the iPhone SE 2022 as well as the Samsung Galaxy A53 to give you an idea of how it stacks up against its rivals. Be sure to check back soon to see how the Pixel 5a fares in our review.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Meta has withdrawn a request it made to its oversight Board seeking guidance on shaping its content moderation policies amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The company had originally asked the Oversight Board for a policy advisory opinion (PAO) in March, following controversy over its decision to “temporarily” relax some of its rules surrounding calls for violence.

Now, nearly two months later, Meta has taken the unusual step of taking back the request. The company cited unspecified security concerns as a reason, but didn’t elaborate. “This decision was not made lightly — the PAO was withdrawn due to ongoing safety and security concerns,” Meta wrote in a statement. It also linked to its blog post on its “ongoing” response to the war in Ukraine, which has not been updated since March 17th.

“While the Board understands these concerns, we believe the request raises important issues and are disappointed by the company’s decision to withdraw it,” the Oversight Board said in a statement. “The Board also notes the withdrawal of this request does not diminish Meta’s responsibility to carefully consider the ongoing content moderation issues which have arisen from this war, which the Board continues to follow.”

While it’s unclear exactly why Meta chose to withdraw its request, the move is nonetheless bizarre. Neither Meta nor the Oversight Board has ever publicly commented on what exactly the company’s original PAO request entailed. Meta’s policy chief Nick Clegg told employees the company would ask the board to review its updated guidance for content moderators, The Washington Post reported in March.

Regardless of the request, Meta is not obligated to implement any policy changes recommended by the Oversight Board, which used a past Policy Advisory request to influence the company’s policies around doxxing.

Meta’s actions are also likely to raise renewed questions about just how much influence the board is capable of wielding. Throughout its brief existence, a central criticism of the organization is that it is set up to take heat for the company’s more unpopular decisions while Meta is free to ignore its recommendations.

Google plans to finally launch its new smart home industry standard called Matter this fall. Devices will all connect quickly and easily using Fast Pair and the platform will support a variety of voice assistants and networking protocols. Those include Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri as well as WiFi, Thread and Bluetooth LE. While Fast Pair feature has been used for headphones and audio gear, the company is working to use it for more things, including syncing lightbulbs and smart plugs with Android and Nest devices. You'll be able to scan a code with your phone to get things rolling, which should be quicker and easier than the current method for adding new gear to your arsenal. 

The company first announced Matter in 2019, although back then it was known as Project Connected Home over IP (Project CHIP). At I/O 2021, Google announced a redesign to its smart home Developer Center to include all the tools developers would need to make product compatible with the standard. Matter was delayed until 2022 last August and the fall timeline now means Google has pushed it out yet again. The delayed launch was supposed to happen in the first half of this year. Still, after all of the roadblocks, the promise of a more seamless process for adding devices to your smart home from a wide range of companies is a compelling one.  

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Nearly a decade after Google Glass made a debut at I/O 2013, Google is working on a new set of augmented reality glasses. The company teased the device at I/O 2022, sharing a short clip that showed off some of its capabilities. We saw an "early prototype" of the wearable transcribe a conversation in real-time, effectively providing captions for the wearer. Google also showed off the prototype translating a conversation from English into Spanish, allowing a non-English speaker to carry out a conversation with the Google employee speaking to them. 

Google didn't say when it plans to release the wearable it showed off today. We'll also note the teaser video the company played during its presentation included text at the bottom of the frame that said what it was showing off was a "simulated point of view," suggesting the final interface may look dramatically different from the one Google showed off today.  

Developing...

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Google's annual I/O keynote was chock full of hardware and software announcements, key among them being the introduction of the Pixel 6a smartphone. The latest midrange handset brings many of the Pixel 6's features down to the more accessible price point of $449. Google also announced the Pixel Buds Pro, its answer to Apple's AirPods Pro and the company's first earbuds to support active noise cancellation. It'll be a while before you can get your hands on either of these gadgets, but here's how to pre-order the Google Pixel 6a and everything else announced today.

Google Pixel 6a

Engadget

The Google Pixel 6a will be available for pre-order starting July 21st for $449, and it will be more widely available starting July 28th. You'll be able to pick it up from the Google store and other retailers.

The Pixel 6a is the latest midrange addition to Google's smartphone lineup. But just because it's not a true flagship doesn't mean it won't have some of the features that the standard Pixel 6 does. In fact, Google carried a lot of things over, including 5G support, the Titan M2 security chip and the same Tensor SoC that's inside the Pixel 6 Pro. It also has an under-display fingerprint sensor and a USB-C port for charging, but alas, no headphone jack.

As far as the camera goes, the Pixel 6a has the recognizable camera bar that the rest of the Pixel 6 series has, along with a dual rear array that includes a 12-megapixel main shooter and an ultra-wide lens. It also has some of Google advanced camera features like Night Sight, Magic Eraser and more. Overall, the Pixel 6a's design is very similar to that of the others in the lineup, but it's about the size of a Pixel 5 and has a 6.1-inch always-on touchscreen with a 60Hz refresh rate and HDR support. Google claims the battery inside the Pixel 6a will last all day.

Google Buds Pro

Google

The Google Pixel Buds Pro will be available for pre-order starting July 21st for $199, and they will be more widely available starting July 28th. They will be available in red, green, blue and black. You'll be able to pick them up from the Google store and other retailers.

The Pixel Buds Pro are the first that Google has made that support ANC. The buds also have a new custom audio processor and transparency mode, the latter of which should help you jump into conversations without taking the buds out of your ears. Like many other earbuds at this price range, the Pixel Buds Pro will be able to connect to more than one device at a time and intelligently switch between, say, your phone when you need to take a call and music from your computer.

Google claims the Pixel Buds Pro will get up to 11 hours of listening time on a single charge, or up to seven hours if you use ANC for the whole time. The company also said they'll be updating the earbuds to support spatial audio later this year.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!