Amanda Blum is a freelancer who writes about smart home technology, gardening, and food preservation. Previously, Amanda has worked as a technology strategist specializing in problem solving and ...

Amazon's Alexa makes for a great smart home hub, adding voice command capabilities to multiple devices, as well as letting you setup daily routines.

Google started out as a search engine, so nobody ever expected it to be directly competing with Amazon, an online retailer, in the smart home market.