The hardware in the Google Home Speaker is quite good, but I do have some reservations about the way that Google’s Gemini AI – and especially its subscription layer – is integrated into Google’s new smart speaker.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Pleasant design | Some colour choices aren’t available in Australia |
| Gemini is significantly smarter than Google Assistant | If you want full-fat Gemini AI, you have to pay for it… perpetually |
| Simple controls for basic audio playback | Integrated power cord is a long term durability concern |
Score: 3/5
In this review
Google Home Speaker Specifications
Google Home Speaker Design
Google Home Speaker Performance
Google Home Speaker Verdict
Ethical disclaimer: The Google Home Speaker used in this review was sent to me by Google Australia, and typically they don’t ask for products to be returned. Which is to say, I didn’t pay money for it.
That doesn’t mean I’m in any way inclined to treat it differently to any other product I test. Seriously, I’ve been reviewing tech gear for more than a quarter of a century in that time, and while (sigh), I do get some seriously dodgy product pitches all too often these days, those go right in the bin. I’m not for sale at ART, and never will be.
What I do feel passionate about is upfront ethical disclosure, which is why you’re reading this right now.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
On with the review…
The Google Home Speaker – Nest branding is, apparently, so last decade – is Google’s latest home smart speaker… and it’s been a while since Google last played around in the audio realm.
That’s not surprising, really, because speakers as entities in their own right, if treated carefully can last decades.
There are countless audiophiles out there clutching their vintage 1960s (or even older) era speakers to this day as the finest examples money can buy, and while I’m not going to argue with them right now, the reality in a technology space is that this isn’t a product category that needs new models each and every year, unless you’re either targeting a completely new price space and demographic… or if the “smart” part of a smart speaker changes markedly.
The Google Home Speaker doesn’t revolutionise audio, but in being Google’s first “Gemini-first” smart speaker, it certainly changes the way you might incorporate this speaker into your daily life. Some of that is very positive… and some of it definitely gives me pause for thought.
Design
The Google Home Speaker’s design feels… strangely familiar.
That’s partly because it does rather look like the speaker bases of previous Google Nest products, but mostly because, let’s be honest here, it also looks like the love child of an Apple HomePod Mini and an Amazon Alexa speaker, given its round shape and the use of a colour bar at its base to indicate activity.
The Google Home Speaker is a relatively compact little speaker, and if you have a pair of them – which I didn’t for testing purposes – you can apparently also pair them up with the Google TV Streamer for a simple home theatre setup.
Controls are kept nice and simple, with a trio of touch controls on the top for volume adjustment and play/pause controls.
They don’t glow when not in use, but as soon as you touch the speaker, they light up.
There’s only one switch on the Google Home Speaker, which you might mistake for a power switch.
The microphone symbol on it is a bit of a giveaway as to its function.
This isn’t so; it’s the hard-wired mute button for the inbuilt microphones.
I have muted the Google Home Speaker’s microphones.
It’s not just me that senses it’s a bit… angry about this, is it?
Invoking this switch does give you both a verbal assurance that it’s not working, as well as a fierce orange glow around the base of the speaker. It’s almost like Google wants the microphones working all the time for… reasons. More on that shortly.
In Australia, the Google Home Speaker is available in just two colour choices; Porcelain or Hazel, which is the tone that Google sent my way.
One annoying factor here is that this isn’t the full colour spectrum for the Google Home Speaker; in other locales you can also get it more ostentatious tones of Berry (Red, more or less) or Jade (Green), but we don’t get those choices down under.
Boo. Hiss. Etc.
I’m always in favour of giving consumers choices, and given some of the other costing issues you’re basically signing up for here, it feels more than a little cheap for Google to say that they won’t ship in all the colour ranges for Aussies to enjoy.
Power for the Google Home Speaker comes from an cable that ends in a standard USB-C plug. One nice step here is that Google does include a 30W USB-C charger in the box with the Google Home Speaker.
One problematic step here is that the actual power cable is sealed at the speaker end – or in Google-speak as per the official spec sheet, it’s “captive” – which I’m not as big a fan of. If the cable breaks or frays some years from now, bearing in mind again that speakers do and should last a long while, that’s going to be a messy repair, or for some consumers, an instant transformation into e-waste.
Because the actual “captive” cable does just end in a USB-C connection, naturally I had to see if I could run the Google Home Speaker from other power sources, such as laptop USB-C ports.
The short answer there is no, though it will draw enough power to come on briefly and tell you that it can’t get enough power from whatever it’s plugged into, requesting instead a 30W power source at the very least. Testing with alternative USB-B PD chargers that can deliver at least that level of power did work, however.
Performance
In connectivity terms, the Google Home Speaker supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4 and it’s also a fully capable Thread border router for your home automation needs. This all works rather well, and I had no real issues setting up the Google Home Speaker outside of needing to choose a new voice for my entire Google Home setup, because that’s the way that Gemini rolls.
Me being me, I chose the voice called Croton, because I was hoping for some Patrick Troughton level enunciation:
Spoiler: That’s not what the Croton voice sounds like. I know, you’re shocked.
I’m going to split my assessment of the Google Home Speaker into two distinct parts, because there’s the hardware/audio side, and then then there’s the integration of Gemini AI itself
On the audio side, the Google Home Speaker promises better audio than the older Nest speakers and… honestly, it basically delivers that.
This is still just a $199 single speaker, so don’t go in expecting party-rocking levels of volume or anything, but basic presentation of most audio types is decent. It’s not going to replace a good high-end speaker system, but as a basic kitchen, office or bedroom speaker, it’s likely to be good enough for the job.
As you adjust the volume, the base light wheel increases its intensity in white light, which isn’t a unique trick, but it does make it easy enough to get a rough feel for where you’re at in audio presentation terms.
Sticking with the hardware, the Google Home Speaker’s microphone pickup is very good indeed… but then, that’s very much the point, because this is a speaker that you’re meant to talk to… and that brings us to Gemini.
The other side of the Google Home Speaker experience, and the part that’s significantly more “new” here is that this is the first Google speaker built with its Gemini AI assistant built in mind, rather than the older Google Assistant.
Cards on the table time here, folks.
I’m not a big fan of AI, partly for its environmental impact, but also because of the way that it’s treating not only creative works – those cute AI-generated cat pictures you love making both burn water and rip off artists – but also the act of creativity itself.
Yes, I have an inherent bias, being a writer and all, but dammit, writing is a human skill, and outsourcing that skill to an AI that’s only really imitating, never actually creating is a short path to a stupider, less skilful community.
Free tip from a veteran, multi-award winning writer: Want to become a better writer?
Don’t use an AI’s prompts for ideas; write it yourself, because there’s just so much research out there that shows that we learn even more from our mistakes than we do our successes.
So… yeah, not a big AI fan, if that wasn’t clear.
AI is very much the point of the way you’re meant to use the Google Home Speaker, however, because Gemini can handle prompts and questions in a significantly more complex and nuanced way than Google Assistant can.
It’s not that Gemini is itself “new” in this context; it’s just available through the speaker without requiring other Gemini-enable devices nearby.
That does mean that you can do things like have quick follow-up conversations where Gemini will remember the last topic thread and build from it in a mostly intelligent way.
Does it always get it right?
No, it’s still AI, and some of the clangers I’ve hit have more been on the amusing side than the outright dangerous side.
The best of which, without a doubt, was telling me that Pro Wrestling matches were determined “inside the ring”.
Dear Gemini, sit down… I have something important to tell you about pro wrestling match outcomes…
I’ve also been on something of a Purple Rain listening kick recently, and so I asked Gemini to play me the Deluxe Expanded Edition of the Purple Rain Album… and it played me the Eric Clapton cover version instead.
Weird, not hugely problematic, at least for now, until it tells me to put glue on my pizzas.
That would totally spoil the taste of the anchovies.
I’m also reminded as I use Gemini that once again all of its “smarts” are built on scraping out content that actual humans (mostly) have written and created, and they’re seeing none of the benefit if I use Gemini this way. Many won’t care about this particular nuance, but I do.
Then there’s the subscription layer that lies underneath all of this.
While Nest as a brand isn’t a thing any more, Google’s incorporating the way that the old Nest Aware subscriptions for Google Nest cameras work into what it calls Google Home Premium subscriptions.
The value of a Google Home Premium ($15/month or $150/year) or Google Home Premium Advanced ($30/month or $300/year) subscription… varies a lot, and some of that value has nothing at all to do with the Google Home Speaker at all.
That’s because this is where Google puts the video monitoring capabilities of Nest cameras, with the Premium tier offering 30 days of event history and the Advanced variant giving you 60 days of event and 10 days of 24/7 monitoring as part of the package.
There’s no camera on the Google Home Speaker (or at least, there’s none that Google’s admitting to) so unless you’ve got Nest cameras, that functionality has little value to you.
You do get a six month ‘free’ trial (come on Google, it’s not free, somebody’s paid $199 for the speaker) of Home Premium with the Google Home Speaker, but this is very much a case of the first taste being free in classic drug dealer style, no?
I say that not for the camera features, but because some of Gemini’s smarter features, if they appeal to you are locked in that subscription tier.
If you want Gemini Live, utilising those natural voice prompts and back and forth chat with the Google Home Speaker, you have to pay for a subscription once your half-year is up.
The odds feel good to me that after six months of usage, most users will have that ingrained into how they use this speaker… and at that point, you’re paying more than half the cost of the Google Home Speaker in subscriptions every single year that you use it, and maybe even more than that.
I do get the fact that AI isn’t inexpensive for any large tech company to implement, and that there will be plenty of folks falling over themselves to do just this as quickly as possible, because it works within how they want to integrate their smart home lives and working routines.
That’s fine, and the Google Home Speaker is highly functional this way… but it’s not without a cost that I feel is worth calling out, as well as the possibility that Google could further lock away Gemini features in the future behind paywalls if it thought that was the right thing to do.
Google Home Speaker: Alex’s Verdict
At a hardware level, the Google Home Speaker is a nice evolution of Google’s speaker lineup; while it’s not the most impressive speaker money can buy, for $199 it’s quite reasonable for audio playback, and microphone pickup for basic voice commands is very good. While I’d love to see all of the colour choices land down under, I do rather like the design, even though it can’t help but feel derivative.
If it wasn’t already obvious, I’m rather more split on the AI features of the Google Home Speaker. Gemini is indeed a highly capable and mostly-intelligent assistant, and I can totally see it becoming a key part of people’s lives, because the best way to use this kind of setup is to go all-in on its ecosystem.
I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the level of data that you’d be handing over to Google in those cases – bear in mind that all AI builds on itself, so even the mistakes I’ve highlighted in this review will no doubt end up being “corrected” in a behind-the-scenes iterative update – and I’m also somewhat uneasy about what having key features locked behind subscriptions will do to its overall value in the mid to long range time frame.
But maybe that’s just me. Perhaps I should ask an expert.
Hey Gemini, should I trust AI?
“Trusting AI is a nuanced topic because these systems are tools designed for prediction and pattern recognition rather than human-like judgement.”
Bloody AI. Can’t even give me a straight answer…
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Google Home Speaker: Pricing and availability
The Google Home Speaker retails in Australia for $199.
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