A roomy 5.8-quart air fryer with twelve presets that handles a weeknight dinner without a second thought, controllable from the VeSync app and through Alexa or Google when your hands are full. The basket is detachable and dishwasher-safe, which is where these live or die. Two caveats: the square footprint eats real counter space, and you'll rarely need the app for everyday cooking.

Govee's color bulbs are the reason a lot of people try smart lighting at all: vivid RGB and 54 preset scenes for a small fraction of what name-brand bulbs cost. You control color, brightness, and on/off by voice or the Govee Home app, group bulbs together, and set sunrise and sunset timers to ease into the morning or down toward sleep. A music-sync mode shifts color to whatever your phone's mic picks up. Two things to keep straight: they run on 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (not 5G), and these A19 bulbs can't pair with a smart switch, since cutting power cuts the connection. For mood lighting on a budget, hard to beat.

A coffee maker that grinds fresh for every pot and brews to SCA-certified standards, with a 10-cup thermal carafe and a podless single-serve option for the one early riser. The SmartHQ app stores MyBrew profiles—bloom time, grind, strength—and it takes Alexa and Google voice. It's a barista setup on the counter. Trade-offs: a premium $349 price for a drip machine, and the built-in grinder adds cleaning steps.

A robot for the chore nobody volunteers for—it climbs the glass with 5500Pa suction and Win SLAM path planning, sprays evenly from triple nozzles, and a portable station with a safety tether lets you move it window to window. It's genuinely satisfying to hand off. The trade-offs: it's expensive, and the tether and power needs limit it on very large or open-frame windows.

A cheap, genuinely accurate room monitor built on a Swiss Sensirion sensor good to about ±0.36°F, with a big clear LCD and on-board logging you can export to CSV—the kind of data that settles arguments about whether the nursery is too dry. It runs up to two years on a coin cell. The catch: standalone it's Bluetooth-range only; remote alerts and voice control need a SwitchBot Hub.

Blink's Outdoor 2K+ keeps everything people like about the line — long battery life, low price, dead-simple setup — and sharpens the picture to 2K with noticeably more detail and color. Color Vision pulls usable color from ambient light before falling back to infrared in full dark, and 4x zoom lets you confirm a package, a face, or a license plate. Two-way audio with noise cancellation keeps conversations clear, and the IP-65 weather-resistant build shrugs off rain and dust year-round. One caveat worth weighing: the smart person and vehicle notifications that filter out junk alerts require a Blink subscription, otherwise you're getting plain motion triggers.

The Cube's clever trick is its shape: the body extends for full capacity or nests down for storage, so it isn't a bulky eyesore the rest of the year. It pulls up to 20 pints a day across 1,500 sq ft and adjusts humidity from 35% to 85%, making it a sensible basement, bathroom, or crawlspace unit. The larger tank means far fewer trips to empty it, and for set-and-forget you run the included hose to a drain or sink. The SmartHome app plus Alexa or Google voice control let you adjust it remotely, while auto-restart resumes your settings after an outage and a washable filter saves on replacements.

The simplest, cheapest way to make an older TV smart. Amazon calls this its fastest HD streaming stick yet, with Wi-Fi 6 for steadier 1080p and a refreshed 2026 Fire TV interface that gets you to shows with less scrolling. All the big apps are here—Prime Video, Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, HBO Max and thousands more—plus free ad-supported content. A nice touch: Direct Power runs it off your TV's USB-C port, so there's no wall adapter to find an outlet for. The included Alexa Voice Remote handles power and volume plus preset app buttons. No 4K here, by design—if your set is HD, this is all the streamer you need.

The insurance policy that pays you back the first time a pipe lets go—it watches the main line, runs daily health tests that catch a drip as small as one drop a minute, and automatically shuts off the water on a detected leak or freeze, reporting flow, pressure, and temperature to the app. The cost is real: it needs professional plumbing on the 3/4-inch main and carries a premium price.

Replace a dumb wall switch and the light it controls becomes schedulable, voice-controlled, and able to fake occupancy while you're away—all without a hub. It's UL-certified, talks directly over 2.4GHz to Alexa and Google, and is the cheapest honest entry to in-wall smart lighting. Two things to know: it's on/off only with no dimming, and it needs a neutral wire and hardwired install.

This is the ecobee at its most complete: a vibrant touchscreen display in metal-sided glass, plus a bundled SmartSensor so the thermostat reads occupancy and comfort in another room rather than just the wall it's mounted on. ENERGY STAR certified, it claims up to 26% in annual heating and cooling savings versus holding a steady 72°F, and a built-in air-quality monitor flags poor air and furnace-filter changes. Compatible with 95% of systems, and the included Power Extender Kit handles C-wire-less homes for a genuine DIY install. Alexa or Siri is built in, so it doubles as a voice speaker—useful if you want it, ignorable if you don't.

Real-time GPS that updates every two to three seconds with unlimited LTE range, so a runner isn't a lost dog—it's a dot you follow on a map. A virtual fence pings you the moment they slip the yard, and it layers in heart-rate and respiratory monitoring. It clips to any collar and is fully waterproof. The cost that matters: the hardware needs an ongoing cellular subscription to work at all.

Tapo's mini smart plug does the smart-home basics well and adds a genuinely useful extra: energy tracking. Beyond scheduling and remote control of whatever you plug in, it logs consumption with clear stats, estimates cost against your billing, and can run high-draw devices during off-peak hours—plus a threshold-based cutoff to prevent overcharging. It's Matter-certified, so it slots into Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, or SmartThings without being boxed into one app, and takes voice commands through Alexa or Google Assistant. The compact body matters for not blocking the second outlet. A solid pick if you want a plug that tells you what your appliances actually cost to run.

A weatherproof two-socket plug that finally makes string lights, fountains, and inflatables run on a schedule instead of a memory. Each outlet is independently controlled and rated 15A, the IP64 housing shrugs off rain, and the long-range 2.4GHz radio reaches up to 300 feet with no hub. The compromises on this older EP40: no energy monitoring, and no Matter or HomeKit—it's Alexa and Google only.

A compact Alexa display that's right at home on a nightstand or kitchen counter. The 5.5-inch screen shows weather, timers, song titles, and photo slideshows at a glance, and the audio is retuned for deeper bass and clearer vocals than you'd expect this small. It's a useful little home hub: control lights and thermostats, pull up a compatible doorbell or camera feed, and make video calls with the 2MP camera. Privacy is handled thoughtfully, with a mic/camera off button, a physical camera shutter, and support for end-to-end encrypted Ring video. Like any Echo it leans on the Alexa app, but for an at-a-glance display this size it's hard to beat.

Dreame's L50 Ultra is built for homes that mix carpet, hardwood, and the occasional raised threshold. The ProLeap system lifts its legs to clear door tracks and steps up to 6cm, and 3D structured light plus AI route it around shoes, cables, and furniture instead of bumping through them. Vormax suction (rated 19,500Pa) and a dual-rubber detangling brush handle hair on both floors and rugs, while dual flex arms reach corners and under low furniture. The PowerDock does the dirty work: self-empties for up to 100 days, washes mop pads in hot water, dries them, and refills solution. Five app carpet modes decide how it treats rugs.