What follows is a rundown of the best smart devices we've tested for every area of the house. And the rollout of Matter, a new smart home interoperability standard, makes it easier than ever to set up and integrate connected gadgets. With Apple HomeKit, you can control your devices with Siri voice commands, or from an Apple Watch, and create scenes to trigger several devices at the same time. Using IFTTT, a service that many of the top smart home brands support, you can link various internet-connected devices and easily program them to respond to real-world events, such as setting your lights to turn on automatically at sunset. With Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, you can set up routines for your devices to work together and do multiple things at once, such as adjusting the temperature and lighting when you get home. After having a bike stolen, for instance, PCMag's Editor-in-Chief Wendy Sheehan Donnell programmed her smart garage door to automatically close every night at a specific time. Many smart home companion apps support scheduling, so you can easily program your devices to perform a certain action at a certain time. Most also work with various forms of voice control. In general, these products connect to the internet, so you can control them from your phone through a companion app. These days, there's a smart version of pretty much every home device you can think of.

Even my air fryer sends me a notification when it's done preheating. I receive severe weather warnings and recipe ideas on the screen of the smart display in my kitchen. I adjust my thermostat via an app on my phone from the comfort of bed. I ask Alexa to reorder protein powder and dog food and it arrives on my doorstep two days later. Now I walk into the bedroom and tell Google Assistant to turn on the lights. Since then, I've been reviewing smart home gadgets for PCMag and my little Florida beach bungalow has transformed into a test bed for the latest home tech, growing smarter by the week. Then I got a dog, which led to the purchase of a smart air purifier to help combat allergies and asthma, and a pet camera to keep an eye on my fur baby (and my home) from my phone, 24/7. My old-school corded upright vacuum was too bulky to fit all the way under, so I picked up a robot vacuum to handle the dirty work for me. After peering beneath my bed to retrieve a fallen item, I was horrified to discover a thick coating of dust on the floor. The transition started a few years ago, out of necessity. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.How to Record the Screen on Your Windows PC or Mac.How to Convert YouTube Videos to MP3 Files.How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill.How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad.How to Block Robotexts and Spam Messages.

Smart House by Audrey Lusk