Google Home Speaker launches with unfinished Gemini for Home
Smart speakers have spent the past few years searching for a compelling second act. Beyond music, timers, and controlling your lights, they have struggled to justify taking up space on the kitchen counter. AI promised to change that. Amazon debuted its new hardware powered by a revamped Alexa last fall, and now it is finally Google’s turn. The Google Home Speaker is the company’s first new smart speaker in six years and its first built for Gemini. After years of neglect, Google appears to be finally getting serious about the smart home — again. The new speaker is the clearest sign yet. Gemini for Home, however, still feels unfinished.
Hardware that impresses: design, sound, and smart home radios
As a piece of hardware, the $99.99 Google Home Speaker is a delightful device. It is the Goldilocks of smart speakers: big enough to sound good, small enough to blend into a room, attractive without drawing attention, and inexpensive enough to consider buying more than one. With its clean look, subtle light ring, and soft green shade, the Home Speaker’s design stands out against the Echo Dot Max and HomePod Mini. Along with green (jade), it also comes in red (berry), white (porcelain), and black (hazel).
The Home Speaker fits in seamlessly everywhere: bedside table, kitchen counter, or two paired under the TV. The soft green jade color blends in without being dull. The only disappointment is the lack of a color-matched cable, something both Apple’s HomePod Mini and Amazon’s Echo Dot Max offer. And while the cable finally uses USB-C for the wall brick, it is not removable from the speaker itself, which is an issue if you want a longer cable run or if it ever starts to fray.
There are no visible controls to mar the mesh fabric-covered body, and the activity indicator light ring encircling the base is subtle enough not to be distracting. If it is — for example, when using two speakers under a TV in a dark room — you can turn the light off in settings, something no other speaker in this class offers. The invisible controls are much more responsive than on previous Google speakers. A tap on top stops or starts the sound or quickly shuts up the assistant, and a tap on either side raises or lowers the volume, with faint glowing white dots to show you hit the right spot.
Sound quality compared to Nest Audio and the competition
The sound is good for its softball size. Side by side with the Nest Audio — Google’s larger, previous-generation speaker, also priced at $99.99 — the Home Speaker does not sound as good. The Audio had both a woofer and a tweeter; the new speaker has just a single driver, and its bass is thinner since it is smaller. But the smaller size makes it easier to find a spot for it around the home. It does offer 360-degree sound, which the Audio did not, and it is a huge upgrade over the smaller, prior-gen Nest Mini.
With two review units, stereo pairing proved a significant upgrade. At 80 percent volume, music was clear, crisp, and house-filling loud. Bass, however, is barely there. Compared to the Echo Dot Max and the now pricier HomePod Mini, the Home Speaker came in a close third on audio quality. The Max brought a hint more bass and a fuller sound, while the Mini is quieter but cleaner. The Home Speaker is loud and clear and holds its own on mids and vocals, though they stretch a little thin at times, and the bass falls short.
This is the first Google smart speaker you can pair with a Google TV Streamer as an audio output. You can use just one, but adding two gets you simulated spatial audio. The sound synced well with no dropouts. Streaming YouTube was great; the voices came through loud and clear. But with some content, audio quality suffered, and it only works with content played through the Streamer — if you switch to another HDMI input, the audio switches away from the Home Speaker.
Smart home foundation: Matter controller and Thread border router
The Home Speaker is a Matter controller, so you can use it to add and control Matter devices through Google Home. It is also the first Google Home audio speaker that can act as a Thread border router. It is on Thread 1.3 for now, but Google is working on supporting Thread 1.4, which will make it easier for Thread border routers from different manufacturers to work together. For anyone building a smart home on Matter and Thread, this is a meaningful hardware upgrade.
The speaker also listens well, with three far-field microphones and a neural processing unit that handles background noise. It performed well in every scenario, hearing commands even from across the room or when playing loud music. It was more responsive than the HomePod Mini, but a tad less than the Echo Dot Max.
Gemini for Home: smarter but slower and less reliable
If you are considering a Home Speaker, the hardware is the main reason to buy one. On the software side, Gemini for Home — Google’s new smart home voice assistant powered by Gemini models and designed to be more conversational, more useful, and smarter — works on all Google Home speakers. That is good news: Google is not locking its newest AI features to new hardware. But it also means there is little reason to upgrade to the new speaker if you are happy with what you have.
As it is built for Gemini for Home, one would expect the Home Speaker to be noticeably snappier than current models, but it was not any faster than the Nest Audio when responding to commands. Occasionally, some requests that require the cloud took close to 10 seconds, and even local commands like “Turn on the lights” sometimes lagged just as long. While Gemini handled complex requests well — turning off one room, setting the thermostat, and turning on the lights in another room in one sentence — it took 10 seconds to do so. Alexa Plus completed the same request in under three.
Speed aside, Gemini is very good with natural conversational control. “Hey Google, I’m cooking and I don’t want to get too hot” correctly lowered the AC. “Hey Google, it’s too dark in here” brightened the lights. When told there might be someone outside, it offered to show the camera feed on a smart display and check the locks. These are genuine quality-of-life improvements because they make voice control easier.
However, Gemini has the memory of a goldfish. While following a recipe, it started walking through making a cherry tomato pasta sauce until a pause caused it to completely lose the thread. Gemini Live fixes some of this by keeping the conversation open until you tell it to stop and remembering previous chats, but this experience feels bolted on. You invoke it differently, by saying “Hey Google, let’s chat,” and unlike Gemini for Home, it cannot take any actions for you — it punts them to Home. Gemini Live is also behind a $10-a-month Google Home Premium subscription.
Trust issues: when the AI gets it wrong
For general knowledge, Gemini is excellent, substantially better than Google Assistant ever was. It handled complex questions about World Cup brackets and could summarize matches without revealing scores. But as a household assistant, it feels less dependable. Mid-cook, asking “When do I add the tomatoes?” returned a response that it could not answer until it verified the voice — despite Voice Match being set up. The same thing happened regularly when adding items to a shopping list.
The biggest problem with Gemini for Home is that you cannot trust it. Like most LLMs, Gemini is often confidently wrong. It announced the correct title when asked for “La Noche de Anoche,” then played an entirely different song. When told it was wrong, it played another incorrect song. When asked if the Home Speaker’s voice could be changed, it repeatedly insisted it had no alternative voice options — it does. Then the same query on a Nest Hub Max caused it to apparently hallucinate a list of names including Dimitrix, Impetus, Cameo, and Russell Gethy. (The actual Gemini for Home voices are named after plants.)
TV controls were the least reliable. Sometimes “Turn on the TV and play YouTube TV” worked. Sometimes Gemini claimed content was not available when it was. Occasionally it announced “Turning on the Living Room TV and launching ESPN,” and then did nothing. These hiccups are part of the current tradeoffs that come with replacing rigid command-and-control voice assistants with more powerful, flexible LLMs. In the home, when these mistakes happen enough, they undermine the convenience.
What is Gemini for Home? A direct answer
Gemini for Home is Google’s new smart home voice assistant powered by Gemini large language models. It is designed to be more conversational, understand natural language commands, and handle complex multi-step requests without requiring rigid phrasing. Unlike the previous Google Assistant, it can infer intent from phrases like “I’m cooking and I don’t want to get too hot” and adjust the thermostat accordingly. It is available on all Google Home speakers and displays, not just the new Home Speaker, but requires a Google Home Premium subscription for some features including Gemini Live and natural language automation creation.
Subscription requirements and the Alexa comparison
What Google Home does not have is ads, something Amazon has introduced to its Echo Show smart displays. But with Gemini for Home, Google is putting some voice assistant and smart home features behind a paywall for the first time. Access to Gemini Live and Help me create, which lets you use natural language to build smart home automations in the app, requires the $10-a-month Standard plan. The $20-a-month Advanced tier adds Home Brief and AI-powered Nest camera features.
After five days of testing Gemini for Home in the Home Speaker, the edge goes to Alexa Plus and its Echo Dot Max. While Gemini for Home’s inference skills were superior in testing, Alexa Plus has narrowed the gap significantly when it comes to general knowledge. It also has better smart home controls, and you can ask it to set up routines with your voice, something Google does not offer. Both let you use natural language to query and control your home and skip repeating the wake word, but Alexa handles it more smoothly and remembers context and past conversations better.
Verdict: a great smart speaker waiting for its AI to catch up
The Google Home Speaker is exactly the hardware the ecosystem needed: good sound, a cleaner and more modern design, and the radios and processing power to anchor a modern smart home with Matter and Thread. For anyone already invested in Google Home, this is the best hardware option available. But Gemini for Home is not there yet as an assistant. It is easier to talk to than Google Assistant ever was, and a lot smarter, but today it is slow and less reliable than Alexa Plus. Add the subscription requirement for some of its more interesting features, and the result is a smart speaker that looks and feels ready for the future but is waiting for its AI to catch up.
Who should buy the Google Home Speaker now
If you are building a smart home around Matter and Thread and want a dedicated voice controller that also sounds decent, the Google Home Speaker is the best option in Google’s lineup. If you already own a Nest Audio and are happy with it, there is little reason to upgrade — Gemini for Home performs identically on both. And if your priority is the most capable and reliable AI voice assistant today, the Echo Dot Max with Alexa Plus is the more dependable choice. The Google Home Speaker is a great piece of hardware, but it is a promise for what its software will become, not what it fully delivers right now.
