Mashable Tech – Spoken Edition

Let’s face it: Most voice assistants are still too dumb be useful in everyday life. Siri is an abomination, and even Alexa can’t answer some of the most basic questions that I ask. Luckily for me, Google Assistant has gotten ridiculously smart in the past year, and it's legitimately changed my life since I've started using it. Google Assistant wasn't always great, and it wasn't even widely available until recently.

A luxury car designer and HD display technology expert walk into a bar. The result? A single cable monitor. AOC and Studio F.A. Porsche partnered to bring the world a sleek, new monitor with just a single cable. The monitor comes in two versions — the 24-inch PDS241 and 27-inch PDS271. The premise of the new monitor is to provide something that's actually worth looking at to your workspace.

Snapchat's new feature, Snap Maps, is freaking people out big time. TL;DR: it doesn't just tell your friends where you are, it also discloses some of your activities. To be fair, Snap Maps also has the potential to give people a very good laugh.

I can still remember in vivid detail the very first time I saw the original iPhone in the flesh. My 16-hour direct flight from Hong Kong had just landed back in New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. The flight attendant announced our arrival back in the Big Apple and the lights let us all know we could take our seat belts off. I stretched my back, and just as I reached over to access the overhead bin to grab my carry-on, I looked one row behind me and saw it: the iPhone.

Tim Cook just acknowledged the iPhone's tenth anniversary in the most Apple way possible. "Here's to the iPhone that changed the world, to the man who dreamed it & the people at Apple who have never stopped looking to its future," the CEO wrote. That may sound like a pretty straightforward sentiment given the occasion, but there's more to the tweet than meets the eye. The tweet was sent at exactly 9:41 a.m.

Take your coffee to bed. The Australian bedding company Ettitude takes coffee grounds from local cafes to upcycle your morning jolt into their bamboo-coffee sheets. The company launched a Kickstarter this month to get the bamboo-coffee blend tucked onto your bed by next month. They claim the coffee blocks odors, wicks away moisture, and keeps your bed fresh. Not bad for used coffee grounds. Based on the company's calculations, we drink 2.25 billion cups of coffee every day around the world.

One of the most stressful parts of leaving home is wondering if your laptop and smartphone will die when you need them most. LAER, a Bluetooth-enabled laptop sleeve currently raising money on Indiegogo, thinks it's the solution to that problem. The premise of the product is pretty simple — it claims it can charge your laptop (PC or Mac), smartphone, and tablet all at the same time. This way, you don't have to bring all of your chargers with you and attempt to find a plug wherever you're at.

Snap Maps don't just tell your friends where you are; they also disclose a few of your activities. And it's freaking people out big time. Anyone who's found themselves lurking on Snap Maps since it launched last week might have spotted a few quirky details that occasionally pop up on people's Bitmojis. Some Bitmojis are appearing in yellow cars, planes, and even on big armchairs. And, some people's Bitmojis are disappearing from the maps completely without them switching on Ghost Mode.

Walk down the sidewalk of any major city and it's likely you'll see the same exact scene: Masses of people staring down at their phones instead of interacting with other living, breathing humans. At some point, after the smartphone became an essential part of our lives, push notifications and news feeds have commanded more and more of our attention. You could just not use a phone, of course, but then you're completely disconnected.

You know what they say: once you go smart you never go back. (People say that, right?) Welcome to the smart side, where technology does all the work for you. These new gadgets will help to transform your house into a tech-assisted paradise. From Bluetooth showerheads to Wi-Fi enabled security systems, your home will be running on its own in no time. These Sonos wireless speakers can pump music throughout your entire home, and simultaneously play different songs in different rooms.