Best Smart Speakers Under $200 Allen St. John Consumer Reports has no financial relationship with advertisers on this site. Want to know a secret about smart speakers? The speaker itself doesn’t have to be all that smart. When you ask your speaker to shuffle the latest Taylor Swift album or tell you the capital of Bolivia, that artificial intelligence magic happens on the company’s servers rather than inside the speaker enclosure sitting on your kitchen counter or family room shelf. Outsourcing these functions to the cloud allows an inexpensive smart speaker to perform most smart functions just as well as a pricier top-of-the-line model.