Google Home Speaker review: The AI hub that forgot it's supposed to be a speaker

It has been nearly six years since Google released the Nest Audio, and the company finally has a successor — 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 “engineered from the ground up for Gemini,” 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.

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

It’s 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 “complex multi-step commands, reduce latency, and expand natural back-and-forth conversation to every supported language.” Those all sound like impressive features for a stationary smart assistant, but my experience didn’t 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. 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’t always “free flowing” and “natural,” either, as it will randomly interrupt you to rate its last answer between 1 and 5 to improve itself.

Funny enough, none of these AI “upgrades” make the Home Speaker a smarter device than the Nest Audio, either. Gemini for Home is rolling out free to all of Google’s 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’s six-month trial lapses. That leaves exactly one thing the Home Speaker can do that your old speaker can’t: 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’s only software.

“As we continue to evolve our hardware offerings, we’ve designed Google Home Speaker to have our latest, most advanced software capabilities,” a Google spokesperson told us. In other words, they’ve simply chosen not to let the older speaker do it. The new speaker’s one exclusive feature is less a feature than a fence.

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— the most visible new feature — also indicates when Gemini is listening, and when it’s not. Meanwhile, nothing from our reader wishlist 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. There’s not a single upgrade that makes this speaker sound any better.

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 — it gets the same assistant, runs the same subscriptions, and sounds better than the speaker it’s meant to replace. And if you don’t care about AI or care more about sound quality, you can grab much better-sounding Bluetooth speakers for under $100. Somewhere along the way, Google forgot that the first job of a speaker is to, you know, be a good speaker.