With 30% of U.S. households using a smart speaker, consumers are gravitating toward an integrated ecosystem with a voice assistant at the core, reported NPD Thursday. Of those homes, the biggest increases in connected technology adoption are in home automation (+152%), smartwatches (+120%), smart TVs (+60%), smart gaming consoles (+60%), streaming media players (+44%) and tablets (+26%), it said.

SiriusXM said Wednesday buying podcast management platform Simplecast, combined with the acquirer's AdsWizz, lets creators publish and generate revenue. Simplecast and AdsWizz will form SiriusXM’s publisher solution business. Sirius has Pandora for Podcasters, it noted.

Samsung's AMOLED 5G phone costs $599. The Galaxy A71 5G begins selling Friday at T-Mobile, Sprint and Samsung.com. The 6.7-inch phone will be available through AT&T, Verizon Wireless and other carriers later this summer, it said. AT&T will begin preorders Friday with 5G availability in 327 markets July 10, said the carrier, pushing a $10 monthly plan with unlimited data.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence slammed Google's alleging his company is stealing “substantial volumes” of Google’s patented technology in search, audio processing and streaming (see 2006110024). Google’s complaint (in Pacer) against Sonos Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco came five months after Sonos alleged Google stole the technologies in five of its multiroom audio patents. Instead of addressing the “merits” of the Sonos allegations against Google, “and paying us what we're owed, Google has chosen to use their size and breadth to try and find areas in which they can retaliate,” said Spence in a statement Thursday: “We look forward to winning our original case, and this newly filed case as well.” Google “seems to have no shame in copying the innovations of smaller American companies in their attempts to extend their search and advertising monopolies into new categories,” said Spence. “We're mostly sad to see a once innovative company with the mission of ‘Do No Evil’ avoid addressing the fact they've infringed on our inventions, and have turned to strong arm tactics the robber barons of old would have applauded." A Google spokesperson declined comment Friday. We’re told Google for now won’t take its allegations to the International Trade Commission, as Sonos did against Google in January. The ITC’s Tariff Act Section 337 investigation into the Sonos complaint is in the discovery phase, where it reached an impasse over the remote review of source code evidence because in-person meetings aren't possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy chose LG Display to lead its project to develop stretchable displays, said the company Thursday. Such displays will play a huge role in IoT, 5G and self-driving cars, said Soo-Young Yoon, head of LG Display Laboratory. Applications include “multi-foldable" smart devices, wearables and auto and aviation displays.

One in four smart homes in the U.S., Germany, France and U.K. has a video doorbell, said Strategy Analytics Wednesday. They're the fourth-most popular smart home device despite being on the market for far less time than smart thermostats, surveillance cameras and smart light bulbs, it said. The devices are installed in millions of smart homes, in spite of concerns about privacy and hacking, indicating perceived benefits outweigh risks, said the research firm. Ring was the most frequently mentioned brand in a survey, mentioned some 50% more often than second-place Nest. The two brands, owned by Amazon and Google, have influenced how video doorbells are sold, established the price points, determined primary selling locations and outlined installation processes, said analyst Jack Narcotta. The devices are on the way to becoming mass-market as prices have dropped and self-installation has become easier, said analyst Bill Ablondi. Feature gaps separating brands will close over the next few years, he said.

InnoPhase has low-power wireless SoCs for edge IoT products, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy. They're targeted to smart home battery-based, direct-to-cloud devices such as smart door locks, remote security cameras and connected sensors, said the company Tuesday.

Four in five U.S. TV households have at least one internet-connected TV device, including connected smart TVs, Blu-ray players, video game systems or streaming media devices, reported Leichtman Research Group Friday. That’s up from 74% in 2018. Some 40% of adults in U.S. TV households view TV from a streaming device daily, vs. 29% two years ago, Leichtman said. By age, 18% of viewers 55 and older watch TV on a connected device daily, 48% for ages 35-54, and 55% for ages 18-34, said the researcher. Among those with a connected TV device, 64% own three or more, with a mean of 4.1 per household. Fifty-eight percent have at least one connected smart TV. The nearly 400 million connected TV devices in U.S. don’t include pay-TV set-top boxes that can be used to access content from the internet, said principal Bruce Leichtman.

Autonomous vehicles might only prevent a third of crashes if automated systems drive too much like people, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported. “It’s likely that fully self-driving cars will eventually identify hazards better than people, but we found that this alone would not prevent the bulk of crashes,” said Jessica Cicchino, vice president-research. A national survey of police-reported crashes gave driver error as the final failure in the chain of events leading to more than nine of 10 crashes, and IIHS said Thursday a third of those were the result of mistakes that AVs would be expected to avoid “simply because they have more accurate perception than human drivers and aren’t vulnerable to incapacitation.” To avoid the other two-thirds, they would need to be specifically programmed to prioritize safety over speed and convenience, it said. “Building self-driving cars that drive as well as people do is a big challenge in itself,” said Research Scientist Alexandra Mueller. Such cars need to be “be better than that to deliver on the promises we’ve all heard.”

Customs and Border Protection in Detroit seized 4,600-plus remote controlled helicopter drones worth some $69,000 that didn't meet FCC labeling requirements, CBP said Wednesday. The goods, imported from China and subject to tariffs, were also found to be undervalued by about $62,000, CBP said. The imports "were seized June 1 in conjunction with a previous shipment containing more than $400,000 in counterfeit merchandise" that was taken in late May, the agency said.