These Are Our Favorite Smart Displays
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Best Overall
Google Pixel Tablet
If You Prefer Alexa
Amazon Echo Show 8 (3rd Gen)
A Cheaper Google Smart Display
Google Nest Hub Max
A Partial Display
Echo Spot (2024)
A smart display might be for you if you want the convenience of a smart assistant with the bonus of having something to look at. When you put Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa into a smart speaker with a tablet-size screen, you get a fun way to see the weather or album art, watch TV shows, follow video recipes, and even make video calls. We’ve tested most of the major displays and listed our favorites below.
Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, including the Best Smart Speakers, Best Google Assistant Speakers, and Best Alexa Speakers. We’ve also got guides to the best tricks an Echo Show can do, and the best Alexa Skills to use.
Updated August 2024: We’ve added the Echo Spot (2nd Gen) as a partial display pick.
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If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED
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Photograph: Nena Farrell
Best Overall
Google Pixel Tablet
You might be wondering—what’s a tablet doing in a guide about smart displays? Well, with the help of the included speaker hub, the Google Pixel Tablet (7/10, WIRED Recommends) can double as a smart display when it’s docked. When magnetically placed on the hub, it activates Hub Mode, where you can display photos from your Google Photos library or choose from a few snazzy clock designs. You can easily control smart home devices by tapping the Google Home icon on the lock screen, which will pull up an overlay of your favorite smart home devices and controls—even check camera feeds on doorbells and Wi-Fi cameras without going to the home screen. (This feature is only available while docked, so your camera feeds are safe from strangers if you take the tablet out and about with you.) The dock’s built-in speakers have robust sound with surprisingly decent bass too.
The Pixel Tablet costs much more than our other picks in this guide, but it does go on sale quite often. The best perk is you get both a handy smart display and an Android tablet to binge movies on when someone else in the household is hogging the TV. The multiuser support lets you add up to eight accounts, each of which can have custom apps, layouts, and wallpapers all protected by fingerprint. It’s a tablet–and smart display–for the whole family.
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Photograph: Nena Farrell
If You Prefer Alexa
Amazon Echo Show 8 (3rd Gen)
The third-generation Echo Show 8 is the middle child in Amazon’s Show family. It’s smaller than the Show 10 and bigger than the Show 5, but I think it’s the best choice for most people. It won’t be hard to read recipes in the kitchen on this screen or catch up on a show as you wash the dishes, and it won’t take up much room on small countertops. It has the same pixel density as the larger Echo Show 10, so it’s sharp. It’s got pretty great audio performance for the price and does all the expected smart display tasks like controlling smart home devices and handling video chat (yes, there’s a camera). It doesn’t swivel to follow you around the room like the Echo Show 10, but the camera does have auto-pan and zoom features to keep you centered in the frame during video calls (as long as you don’t wander too far out of view). The camera has a privacy shutter for when you aren’t using it, or you can leave the shutter open and have it double as an indoor security camera.
This latest generation also has a built-in smart home hub, so you can connect smart devices with Zigbee, Matter, and Thread directly to the Show 8. There are now widgets you can add to the on-screen slideshow too, such as the weather, calendar, music playback, and more. This isn’t tied to the third-generation model though; older Echo Shows have this option now via a software update.
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Photograph: Simon Hill
A Cheaper Google Smart Display
Google Nest Hub Max
The Google Nest Hub Max is a great all-around smart display. It has an unobtrusive design, a 10-inch touchscreen display, some pretty good speakers, and a camera for video calls over Google Duo. (Google ditched broader support for Google Meet and Zoom last year.) It makes for an easy digital photo frame, too, if you use Google Photos. The camera can identify individual members of the house and show personal information tied to each person, like upcoming calendar events. Just know you’ll need the right amount of space for it, and while you can turn the camera off, you may want to pick up a privacy cover to block it when it’s not in use.
There’s now a guest mode that lets you enjoy all the voice assistant’s features without saving anything to your account or showing personalized results—just say, “Hey Google, turn on Guest Mode” to enable it. If you use multiple Google Nest speakers and smart displays, you should know that you can finally adjust the volume of grouped devices—Google brought the feature back after it won a lawsuit against Sonos.
★ A camera-free alternative: Google’s second-gen Nest Hub ($100) (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a great option if you don’t need a camera and don’t mind a smaller 7-inch screen. It has a wake-up alarm that emulates the rising sun for gentler mornings, and it has sleep tracking tech to track your sleep quality, though the quality of the results isn’t great. It also supports gestures—like playing or pausing a video with a hand movement—by using unique radar tech.
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Photograph: Nena Farrell
A Partial Display
Echo Spot (2024)
If you don’t think you’ll use all the bells and whistles that smart displays have to offer, and really just want some visual additions for the weather or your calendar, the second generation Echo Spot (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is just what you need. This rounded device has a small screen—which looks like a half-circle, but is a rectangle within said half-circle—that can display the weather and calendar when you make voice requests, and show details about the songs playing.
It’s great for bedrooms since it always shows the alarm set underneath the time, making it easy to confirm your alarm will be ready to go the next morning. You can also customize the clock face with a handful of colors and clock faces. It’s a nice in-between of a smart display and a speaker, and best of all, it’s ad-free.
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Photograph: Sonos
Forget the Screen
Sonos Era 100
We don’t believe anyone needs a smart display by any stretch. If you don’t need a screen (we already have enough of those!), a smart speaker offers the power of a voice assistant with often much better sound. We like the Sonos Era 100 ($249) for Alexa lovers (9/10, WIRED Recommends) because it will give you the best sound you can get from a compact smart speaker. Sonos speakers also connect easily with each other and you can control Spotify and other services through the Sonos app. If you have an iOS device, you can play any music service with AirPlay support. If you’re looking for a Google Assistant speaker, our top recommendation is the Nest Audio ($100), or the Sonos One ($210) since the Era 100 isn’t compatible with Google Assistant voice commands. Read our Best Smart Speakers guide for other recommendations.
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Photograph: Amazon
More Echo Shows We Like
Amazon Echo Show Family
Amazon’s Alexa is not as good as Google Assistant—although Echo’s recipe feature, which shows step-by-step instructions, rivals the similar feature Google cooked up for its displays. Still, Amazon invented this category, and the company always has a handful of different smart displays to choose from. If the Echo Show 8 doesn’t seem right for you, here’s the others we like.
Echo Show 5 (3rd Gen, 2023) for $90: The smaller and cheaper third-gen Echo Show 5 has a 5.5-inch screen that works best on a desk or a bedside table. We think it’s a bit too small for the kitchen or living room, but that depends on how you plan to use it.
Echo Hub for $180: The Echo Hub (8/10, WIRED Recommends) isn’t exactly a smart display. It lacks powerful speaker capabilities and doesn’t have a camera for calls or Amazon’s Drop-In video call feature. Instead, it focuses entirely on being a smart home dashboard with built-in Alexa, plus features like widgets and the photo frame. I think it takes the best, most easily used features of a smart display and cuts out the rest. But if you want a good speaker, don’t choose this one.
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Photograph: Google
Do You Need a Smart Display?
The Pros and Cons
Smart displays are helpful, acting as hubs for your smart home devices, walking you through recipes while you chop away in the kitchen, and in some cases allowing you to video chat hands-free too. But we’re not sure how long they’ll be worth it, or even exist, in their current form. Meta’s Portals that we liked are no longer available. Google recently stopped issuing software updates for some third-party displays (more on that below), and it seems to have shifted focus to its new Pixel Tablet (our top pick).
Amazon has continued to make new smart displays, even after losing $10 billion in 2022 thanks to failures around the Alexa voice assistant. The Alexa team was reportedly hit hard by layoffs in 2022 and 2023, but new smart displays have come out since then. Apple still hasn’t made a smart display, but it’s made smart display-adjacent features for iPhones when they’re charging.
The future of these smart home devices isn’t clear right now, but if you’re going to get one, we suggest sticking with devices directly from the brand whose voice assistant you prefer. Otherwise, consider one of our favorite tablets instead.
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Photograph: Apple
What About Apple?
Apple iPhones now have a StandBy Mode included in iOS that activates when an iPhone is on its side and charging, using stands like this one from Twelve South. I had hoped this feature would feel similar to a smart display, but StandBy Mode is limited to customizable clock faces, showing your photos, and having your texts pop up in large text that fills the screen. It doesn’t scratch the itch of all the features you get in a smart display and instead feels like a fancy alarm clock.
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Photograph: Lenovo
Smart Displays to Skip
Other Smart Displays
We don’t like every smart display. Here are the ones we’re skipping after trying them out.
Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen, 2021) for $250: This smart display is situated on top of a large cylindrical speaker, which makes it sound great. The screen physically swivels to follow you around the room as you use it, keeping you in frame while you video chat or keeping your streamed workout video in your line of sight as you move about. Because the screen moves around so much, you may have trouble positioning it in tighter spaces—especially in corners.
Echo Show 15 for $280: This is the largest of them all, with a 15.6-inch display, and it has customizable widgets so you can have smart-home device controls and calendar reminders available whenever. It’s made to be mounted on your wall like a TV (a stand is sold separately), and the Show 15 pairs with a Fire TV remote (you can use the app) to use the streaming features. Voice commands for streaming don’t work well, so it feels like a weird in-between of a smart display and a TV that doesn’t excel in either department.
Third-Party Google Displays: Google is no longer updating software for some of the third-party smart displays we used to recommend in this guide. If you have one, it will still work, but some features will likely suffer or disappear entirely as time passes. This seems to be the fate of most third-party Google smart displays, which is why we don’t recommend them anymore.
Nena Farrell covers consumer tech at WIRED and specializes in smart home products and parenting gear. She previously wrote for Wirecutter and Sunset. She lives in San Diego, where she can be found pushing her child around in various strollers.
