Google is taking the smart home to the next level with their brand-new Google Home Speaker. It has a new design, better sound and, most importantly, it brings AI into the device, quite literally changing the conversation when it comes to how you interact with your smart home from here on.
In the box, you get the Google Home Speaker with an attached power cable. This, right out of the gate, is a misstep. A damaged cable that can’t be replaced means the end of your device, in most cases. Length can also be a concern in this scenario, but the 59” cable in the US (1.5m for the rest of the world) should give you plenty of length for placing it wherever you want.
The look of the Google Home Speaker is vastly improved over previous iterations of their smart home speakers. It lands somewhere between the Amazon Echo Dot and the Apple HomePod in terms of its shape. It’s not a sphere, but not quite a cylinder either. It is covered in a high-quality mesh fabric and comes in a number of new colours, including Hazel, Porcelain, Jade and Berry (with Berry being a US exclusive).
“The look of the Google Home Speaker is vastly improved over previous iterations of their smart home speakers.”
The controls, as with previous Google speakers, are on top of the Google Home Speaker, with simple taps on the sides adjusting volume and taps on the top playing and pausing media. The microphone mute is controlled by a toggle on the back of the speaker. The big difference is where the indicator lights are. Previously, those lights were found on top, but they are now on an RGB ring forming the base at the bottom of the speaker, flashing white when listening, blue when thinking and orange when muted, among other multicoloured displays you might see.
Setting up the Google Home Speaker is easy enough, assuming everything is going well with your 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. For whatever reason, I had a real headache with this, despite having used it dozens of times to connect smart home devices. I’d love a world where such a distinction isn’t necessary, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. On the Google Home App side, it recognized the device easily and connected quickly once I sorted out my own issues.
The Google Home Speaker’s sound quality is quite the leap over Google speakers I have heard in the past. The Home Speaker has a 58mm driver that delivers fantastic mid- to high-frequency sound across everything from Tool to Michael Jackson to John Williams. The vocals were clear and crisp, and the instrumentation was excellent.
“The Google Home Speaker’s sound quality is quite the leap over Google speakers I have heard in the past.”
Songs with a heavy bass sounded a little muddy, with the vocals still managing to break through and sound clear, but for a speaker roughly the size of a softball, I didn’t expect a game-changing subwoofer. Google claims the bass is 2.5x stronger than in their Nest models, and I believe that based on what I heard, but it didn’t deliver the low-frequency clarity it did at higher frequencies. You will, however, get uniform audio no matter where you are in the room, as the speaker delivers beautiful 306-degree sound.
As well, you can hear the Google Home Speaker; it can hear you just as well, with three far-field microphones that pick up your voice clearly, even when blasting dual of the fates (I wasn’t kidding about John Williams) and talking at a very quiet volume. I was blown away by the ability to speak just above a whisper fifteen feet from the speaker, and still be heard easily. So wherever you are in the room, whatever is playing and however loudly you are playing it, you won’t need to try and scream over your media to get the device’s attention.
The Google Home Speaker is AI-ready and compatible with Gemini for Home, a much more useful assistant for your home because it is built to be aware of it. Being connected to Google Home, it knows what smart devices you have and can easily execute complex commands like “turn off all the lights except for the living room lamp,” and it follows that command lightning-fast. It can also retrieve information for you from Google Workspace, Tasks, Calendar and Keep to create or source whatever you have available.
Gemini for Home on the Google Home Speaker can also communicate more naturally, explaining an answer to a question, asking for context if needed, or offering to take you through the steps to solve your problem. It listens for follow-up questions and keeps the conversation going, perfectly remembering what you’ve been talking about, but only limited to the current conversation; once the conversation is over and the light goes out, it doesn’t have the recall to go back to an earlier chat.
It is worth noting, to curb expectations, that Gemini for Home is not as powerful a tool as Gemini. You’re not going to be doing the deep dives that you can do with Gemini on your phone or computer, but that’s not what Gemini for Home is built for. Gemini for Home is intuitive and, to me, feels more like an assistant you are conversing with than one you are commanding, if that makes sense. The assistant on your Google Home Speaker is meant to make your day-to-day life easy to navigate.
To give their AI more power, Google is offering six months of Google Home Premium to anyone who buys the Google Home Speaker until September 30. This will give you more robust control over your home, including advanced security and automation, with Gemini helping you keep track of it all.
The Google Home Speaker comes in at $99.99 USD, and I think that this price is right on the money. At double the price of the Google Nest Mini, you are getting way more than double the device: AI capabilities, sound quality that blows the Nest family out of the water, a slicker design, and superior responsiveness. It’s clear that the Google Home Speaker is the next step in Google’s smart home evolution, and it excites me to see where they might head next.
