If you’re not entirely sure how these handy smart home gadgets actually work, we’ll explain exactly how video doorbells work, where they store the video they record and how they can be integrated with the best smart home devices to automate your home.

Imagine having an involved conversation with your Nest Audio or Nest Thermostat about the kinds of music you enjoy listening to in the summer, your favorite kinds of weather, what kind of clothes you like to wear when it’s cold, and more. With LaMDA, the simple ask-and-receive nature of voice commands is still in place, but users will be able to expect much more intuitive (and smoother-sounding) responses from Google Assistant.

Today I learned that the Ingenuity drone copter twirling about on Mars communicates with the Perseverance rover using 900MHz Zigbee radios. Not Wi-Fi, GSM, or something exotic like fission-powered lasers or space algae, but the same consumer tech you use to turn on a Philips Hue lightbulb.

Brands like Ring and Wyze, both of which having appeared multiple times in our previous coverage of smart home tech, have in recent months launched new models of their devices — and some brand new ones — like video cameras and doorbells that allow you to monitor activity at your door in real time even if you’re miles away.

At a 40,000-foot view, Thread networking is a mesh networking protocol for HomeKit and other smart home devices with direct peer-to-peer communication and is self-maintaining and self-healing. Even if a smart home device goes off, other devices will still be kept alive, and the network will automatically reconfigure itself as needed.

A smart lock is the quintessential smart home device. It makes your space more secure, simpler to control and accessible from anywhere all at once.

Google has outlined its plans of leveraging Matter – an open source smart home standard it is developing with the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Samsung – to make its ecosystem of devices even smarter and more interconnected. To start, the company has revealed that it will add Matter support to Android and Nest-branded smart home devices.