If you believe what Google and Amazon want you to believe, this is the age of voice assistants… once again. This week, both companies unveiled more details about the future of their smart home ecosystems, which centers on a couple things: new smart speakers (of course) in the form of the Google Home Speaker and new Echo products with better sound and faster chips, but perhaps more importantly, a new, and supposedly, upgraded crop of voice assistants to power them. For Google, it’s Gemini for Home and, for Amazon, there’s Alexa+, both of which are being fueled by advances in large language models (LLMs) like those used by ChatGPT .

In both companies’ estimation, Alexa+ and Gemini for Home are not just new generations of voice assistants, but the first real generational expansion

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