{"id":84489,"date":"2026-06-24T13:34:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T13:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/84489\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T13:34:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T13:34:13","slug":"google-home-speaker-review-the-ai-hub-that-forgot-its-supposed-to-be-a-speaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/84489\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Home Speaker review: The AI hub that forgot it’s supposed to be a speaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been nearly six years since Google released the Nest Audio<\/a>, and the company finally has a successor \u2014 sort of. The Google Home Speaker launches today for $99.99, ditching the Nest name and the larger pillow shape in favor of a smaller fabric-wrapped orb with a glowing light ring at its base. Google describes the device as \u201cengineered from the ground up for Gemini,\u201d and as soon as I took it out of the box and set it up, it was clear this is a product built to showcase its AI assistant, not its sound quality. Needless to say, we here at SoundGuys are more than a little disappointed.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a look at the acoustic hardware. The new Home Speaker uses a single 58mm full-range driver, pushing what Google calls \u201cbalanced, 360-degree sound,\u201d while the Nest Audio packs a larger 75mm woofer with a dedicated 19mm tweeter. The headline audio claim \u2014 \u201ca 2x larger driver and 2.5x stronger bass\u201d \u2014 is measured against the Nest Mini, the $49 puck from 2019, and not the $99 Nest Audio, both of which\u00a0they recently killed off<\/a>. Instead, we get half the audio hardware for the same sticker price as the latter.<\/p>\n

A speaker that prioritizes listening to you over you listening to it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear where the other half of the effort actually went: AI. Google says it has made over 2,500 fixes and improvements to Gemini for Home in order to handle \u201ccomplex multi-step commands, reduce latency, and expand natural back-and-forth conversation to every supported language.\u201d Those all sound like impressive features for a stationary smart assistant, but my experience didn\u2019t quite match. The speaker takes its time to process queries, and was noticeably slower at executing tasks like playing a specific song than my Amazon Echo Studio<\/a>. It did keep track of multiple topics in a single conversation, but not without getting mixed up. In one instance, it offered to tell me a joke when I said I was feeling tired, and later, when I asked about the weather, it told me another joke completely unprompted. Conversations aren\u2019t always \u201cfree flowing\u201d and \u201cnatural,\u201d either, as it will randomly interrupt you to rate its last answer between 1 and 5 to improve itself.<\/p>\n

\"googleThe base ring light activated when speaking to the Home Speaker.\"aThere’s a physical mic mute switch at the base.<\/p>\n

Funny enough, none of these AI \u201cupgrades\u201d make the Home Speaker a smarter device than the Nest Audio, either. Gemini for Home is rolling out free to all of Google\u2019s first-party speakers, including the Nest Audio, and the marquee Gemini Live experience requires the same $10-per-month Google Home Premium subscription on either device once the new speaker\u2019s six-month trial lapses. That leaves exactly one thing the Home Speaker can do that your old speaker can\u2019t: pair two of them with the Google TV Streamer (and only the TV Streamer) for stereo home theater audio, with Dolby Atmos and spatial audio support. When we asked what hardware made that possible, Google confirmed that it\u2019s only software.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we continue to evolve our hardware offerings, we\u2019ve designed Google Home Speaker to have our latest, most advanced software capabilities,\u201d a Google spokesperson told us. In other words, they\u2019ve simply chosen not to let the older speaker do it. The new speaker\u2019s one exclusive feature is less a feature than a fence.<\/p>\n

As for the rest of its connectivity, the Home Speaker supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4 limited to SBC, and a Thread border router with Matter support, making it a capable smart home hub. The light ring along the base\u2014 the most visible new feature \u2014 also indicates when Gemini is listening, and when it\u2019s not. Meanwhile, nothing from\u00a0our reader wishlist<\/a> for a true Nest Audio sequel made the cut: no room tuning, no improved EQ, no aux input or wired connections of any sort: the lone USB-C port handles power only, no USB Audio.\u00a0There\u2019s not a single upgrade that makes this speaker sound any better.<\/p>\n

All in all, the Google Home Speaker is really just a $99 microphone array and smart home hub that happens to play music, designed to put Gemini in your kitchen and a subscription on your credit card. If you already own a Nest Audio, keep it \u2014 it gets the same assistant, runs the same subscriptions, and sounds better than the speaker it\u2019s meant to replace. And if you don\u2019t care about AI or care more about sound quality, you can grab much better-sounding Bluetooth speakers for under $100<\/a>.\u00a0Somewhere along the way, Google forgot that the first job of a speaker is to, you know, be a good speaker.<\/p>\n

Thank you for being part of our community. Read our\u00a0Comment Policy<\/a> before posting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has been nearly six years since Google released the Nest Audio, and the company finally has a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,132,1429,42164,8864,45606],"class_list":["post-84489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-google","tag-google-ai","tag-google-home-speaker","tag-google-nest","tag-nest-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}