The newly announced Google Home speaker is now on sale in Australia, the first smart speaker from Google in almost six years.
While all the older Google and Nest speakers have been upgraded to run Gemini, the new Google Home is the first to be built for Gemini from the ground up.
Priced at $199, the same price as the original Google Home speaker, it’s a compact option with a host of new features, including an RGB light ring surrounding the base, a new 360° speaker design letting you place it anywhere. You can also pair two of them with your Google TV Streamer for spatial surround sound.
It comes with a Quad Core A55 processor, 1GB of DDR4 RAM and 4GB of on-board storage, a nice little upgrade on the last gen.
Gemini brings a host of new features, 10 new voices and improved natural language understanding so you can ask more complex questions, string commands together and get better responses when you ask multiple questions and respond to the answers with Continued Conversation.
Google is also bringing a premium tier of features to the Google Home speaker. With a subscription (after an initial free 6-month trial) including free-flowing chats with Gemini Live, or searching your Nest cams to find out if you left the gate open. You can also ask Gemini to just ask ‘What happened around the house today’ and get a summary.
So I’ve had just over a week with the new Google Home speaker. I waited until they went on sale to grab another one so I could try the new Home Theatre mode, so here’s how it went.
In terms of size, the Google Home is surprisingly compact, looking like a taller Nest Mini speaker.
It comes in a soft-touch custom 3D-knit textile which is made from recycled materials. It’s slightly loose around the speaker’s body, with touch controls on top for playing/pausing audio and fast-forwarding.
The touch controls are the same as you’re used to with the Nest and Google Home speaker with volume up and down on the sides and a tap in the middle able to play or pause your audio.
The speaker comes in only two colour choices: Hazel and Porcelain, with Google sending over the Hazel model for the review.
I quite like the hazel, however, I will forever highlight the exclusive colours the US gets: Berry and Jade.
Google did slowly increase colour availability of the Nest Mini, so fingers crossed we see some more options in the future.
The speaker has an RGB light ring surrounding the base, which glows white when switched on for the first time, and cycles through different lighting schemes when thinking – a nice visual indicator that it’s still working on your query.
There’s a 1.5m power cable at the rear which plugs into the 30W USB-C charger in the box. Frustratingly, it’s wired into the speaker rather than a separate cable, which could render the speaker useless if the cable is damaged. The cable connects next to the mute switch which has an orange strip visible when the speaker is muted, and the speaker has an orange glow when muted as well.
Underneath, a rubber foot keeps the speaker in place on even glossy surfaces, while protecting them – and leaving no marks.
Inside, the new Google Home has a 58 mm full-range single driver offering 360° ‘uniform sound’. It’s designed to be placed anywhere in your home and give great audio ‘whether you’re standing right next to the speaker or across the room’.
Audio quality is pretty good. I’d love a lot more bass on the speaker for a more ‘full’ sound, but it is pretty good for its size. The mids and high range come across well, but the lack of bass is noticeable when you hit those heavier tracks.
Overall, it’s not quite as powerful as the Nest Audio, but a lot more power than the Nest Mini.
The setup is simple, you’ll need the Google Home app which is available for both Android and iOS through their respective app stores. It’s a fairly easy process. Power on the speaker, then load Google Home and hit the add button, then follow the bouncing ball.
The only notes are that you’ll need a Gmail account, unfortunately our paid Workspace accounts won’t work. You’ll also only be invited to link a limited number of video services at the start, but you can link your other Australian services including SBS and more.
The speaker setup did prompt me to upgrade to Gemini from Google Assistant, but this is most likely just a holdover from the Nest Audio setup process.
If you’re used to the features from the existing range of Nest and Google Home speakers that have been released over the last nearly 10 years, you’ll be right at home, with Gemini just adding more conversational ways to ask for information, perform tasks and more.
You can add the new Google Home to your audio groups around your home, cast audio to it, and control your smart home, ask Gemini questions and set reminders – even ask it how your calendar looks to start the day.
Where Gemini seems a little different to Google Assistant is in the way it can listen to you without having to speak like you think it wants.
I can um, and ah my way through a command to add something to my shopping list, including asking it a question halfway through “Add Basil to the shopping list, wait, um, is Thai Basil different to Basil? Ok, add that” – and it just did it.
It can also understand when I’m across the room asking when the next Socceroos game is – Saturday 4am against Egypt! Google’s Continued Conversation also lets you ask follow-up questions, “Where in the US are they playing?”, and it remembers context to keep going.
A big feature of the Google Home announcement list was the Home Theatre mode.
Using this feature you can pair your Google Home Speakers with a Google TV Streamer for “a cinematic experience with spatial surround-sound audio”.
I’ll admit I was a little gun-shy on this feature. Google announced the ability to pair two Nest Audios with a Chromecast with Google TV for a home theatre experience at launch. The reality was it launched so late it never ‘really’ arrived – but it’s hard to argue with the experience this time, with the Google TV Streamer straight up offering to pair them when it automatically detected it.
A process of following the bouncing ball and its setup. You’ll get recommendations to move the speakers to a wider distance between each other, but apart from that you’re good to go.
In testing, it just works. YouTube, Netflix, they all had stereo audio and sound a lot better – or perhaps that’s more an indictment on the internal TV speakers.
Some features are locked behind a Google Home Premium subscription.
The subscription comes with a free 6-month trial if you purchase before September 30th, but locks away some of Google’s best features including Summaries from your Nest cameras, and Gemini Live.
Gemini Live gives you a more conversation-like experience, beyond even Continued Conversation. In Gemini Live you can start out with an idea, and then let Gemini respond with clarifications and suggestions – but the new Gemini models understands you better and you can interrupt, clarify and introduce more information as you go.
If you want to continue using the subscription after comes in two tiers, starting at per month/0 per year for the basic plan, or per month/0 a year for the more advanced version.
The Nest and Google Home ecosystem felt a little abandoned for a long time, with features and requests sometimes failing or simply stopping altogether. With the launch of the new Google Home with Gemini, it seems to represent a renewed focus on the smart home for Google, because this new speaker just works.
It’s not as powerful as some previous Nest/Google Home speakers, but it strikes a good balance between a smaller speaker and big features.
Audio is great for what it is though lacks lower-end bass. The 360-degree speakers are able to give a surprisingly full sound in most rooms without having to fiddle with settings and the far-field mics pick up commands from almost anywhere in the room seemingly even at a whisper.
The new RGB Halo is fantastic, adding some fun while also letting you know when the unit is thinking, rather than wondering if it’s just not hearing you or has stopped responding.
Gemini is still one of the biggest feature upgrades for the Google Home and it really does work. The intense focus on AI at Google means we’ll very likely see Google Home as part of their plans moving forward, with new features.
The locking of features behind a paywall isn’t the best, however it does show that Google is serious about making money from Gemini – and there’s a few features there that are good, but Google is still fighting a battle to monetise their AI features for consumers.
As a smart speaker though. The new Google Home is a breath of fresh air and is a promising start for Gemini in the smart home.
Daniel has been talking about, learning about and using tech since he was able to toggle switches and push buttons. If it flashes, turns on or off or connects he wants to use it, talk about it and learn more about it. Like this article? Buy me a coffee!
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