Good things take time, but not all things that take time are good. The jury is still out on the Google Home Speaker, but it certainly took a while to arrive. After announcing its new speaker last August, Google finally has a release date. The company’s first new smart home speaker in years will launch on June 25, and you can preorder it today for $99.99.
The generically named Google Home Speaker is Google’s first home audio device in almost six years. The last one was the Nest Audio, which debuted back in September 2020. The new device is small and round—an oblate spheroid, technically. It’s covered in a partially recycled fabric available in four colors: hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (jade and berry are limited to the US). Google says the device produces “360-degree sound” for a uniform listening experience anywhere in a room.
Previous Google speakers included Assistant-style illuminated lights, but the Google Home Speaker features a light ring around the bottom that glows when the device is listening, “thinking,” or responding. This is becoming a trend with Google. The company will require a similar glowing lightbar embellishment on the upcoming Googlebook laptops. There are three far-field microphones distributed around the speaker that will pick up your speech, and there’s a mute switch when you don’t want it listening for the “OK Google” trigger.
Inside, the speaker has a quad-core A55-based processor clocked at 2GHz with a dedicated NPU. It runs local AI models for better sound isolation, allowing it to filter out background noise better than past smart speakers. Smart speakers have an annoying tendency to mishear, so the Google Home Speaker could be less frustrating in that way. If you don’t want to talk to the speaker, there are capacitive touch controls on the top to control media playback.
Interestingly, the new device may not be an upgrade on all fronts. The Nest Audio had a 75 mm woofer and a 19 mm tweeter, but the Google Home Speaker has only a single 58 mm full-range driver. Google tells Ars that the new speaker’s audio quality will fall between the Nest Audio and the smaller Nest Mini.
Despite the apparent drop in audio quality, the Google Home Speaker does have some utility beyond talking to Gemini. If you have a Google TV Streamer, up to two Home Speakers can pair with it for “Immersive” audio output. It also integrates with any other Nest speakers and displays on your local network.
Buying the Google Home Speaker also gets you six months of Google Home Premium. This adds various AI features to the Home app, which you may or may not want. It also enables Gemini Live on the speaker, allowing you to have a back-and-forth conversation with Google’s AI. Even if you want this feature, you may not need the new speaker, as Gemini is also available on Google’s other speakers. Your old speaker may not have the local processing and noise filtering capabilities of the new model, but Gemini lives in the cloud—the Google Home Speaker is just a new way to interact with it, and it can be yours for a hundred bucks.
