SMART ASS ISTANT

These days, we’re not short of assistance thanks to advances in voice recognition, powerful servers able to churn through complex requests, and an ever–growing network of cloud–connected everything. It all adds up to a computing ecosystem that benefits both from central control and from an easy way to make that control happen. We’re primarily going to look at Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant because, frankly, the others (Microsoft’s Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby, primarily) are small fry — but feel free to try them.

Realistically, we’re also not going to be able to choose a definitive best