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Sonos is giving some serious side-eye to Google's assertion that Assistant and Alexa can't play nicely
More fuel for the fire in the ongoing legal skirmish
It's no secret that Sonos and Google aren't best friends right now. The companies are currently involved in several different lawsuits regarding intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, and it doesn't seem like the relationship will improve anytime soon. Sonos's Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus delivered remarks to the Senate Judiciary antitrust committee yesterday, calling for action on a lack of interoperability procedures preventing them from using multiple voice assistants at once.
Google and Samsung team up to make smart home products more interoperable
Is this a sign that Bixby might be on the way out?
Google has been trying to convince Samsung to drop Bixby in favor of Google Assistant for some time now. While we don't know for certain how those conversations are going, Samsung did add support for Google Assistant to some of its smart TVs last month. And today, a joint partnership was announced that will see Samsung SmartThings gadgets add integration with Nest products — as well as the Google Assistant.
European COVID-19 tracing apps will soon be compatible with each other
Making tracing across countries easier in the EU
Back in June, EU members agreed that their coronavirus tracing apps would need to be interoperable to make it easier to travel during the summer, hoping that this would help to trace contacts across borders to prevent a second wave. While that timeline hasn't quite worked out (summer holidays are over in most countries), the European Commission today has announced that it's finally setting up a standardized interoperability gateway for tracing apps.