Published Jun 12, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek, Joe has been writing about technology since starting his career in 2018 at KnowTechie. He's covered everything from Apple to apps and crowdfunding and loves getting to the bottom of complicated topics. In that time, he's also written for SlashGear and numerous corporate clients before finding his home at XDA in the spring of 2023. He was the kid who took apart every toy to see how it worked, even if it didn't exactly go back together afterward. That's given him a solid background for explaining how complex systems work together, and he promises he's gotten better at the putting things back together stage since then. The modern smart home has a problem, built by competing voice assistant manufacturers that don't want anyone else's devices to take over. No matter how well the devices connect into that ecosystem, they still have to play by the rules set by Amazon and Google, and be at the whimsy of how their voice models work.…