GoKawiilGood things take time, but not all things that take time are good. The jury is still out on the Google Home Speaker, but it certainly took a while to arrive. After announcing its new speaker last August, Google finally has a release date. The company’s first new smart home speaker in years will launch on June 25, and you can preorder it today for $99.99.
The generically named Google Home Speaker is Google’s first home audio device in almost six years. The last one was the Nest Audio, which debuted back in September 2020. The new device is small and round—an oblate spheroid, technically. It’s covered in a partially recycled fabric available in four colors: hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (jade and berry are limited to the US). Google says the device produces “360-degree sound” for a uniform listening experience anywhere in a room.
Credit: Google Google is into lighting effects again. Google is into lighting effects again. Credit: Google
Previous Google speakers included Assistant-style illuminated lights, but the Google Home Speaker features a light ring around the bottom that glows when the device is listening, “thinking,” or responding. This is becoming a trend with Google. The company will require a similar glowing lightbar embellishment on the upcoming Googlebook laptops. There are three far-field microphones distributed around the speaker that will pick up your speech, and there’s a mute switch when you don’t want it listening for the “OK Google” trigger.
Inside, the speaker has a quad-core A55-based processor clocked at 2GHz with a dedicated NPU. It runs local AI models for better sound isolation, allowing it to filter out background noise better than past smart speakers. Smart speakers have an annoying tendency to mishear, so the Google Home Speaker could be less frustrating in that way. If you don’t want to talk to the speaker, there are capacitive touch controls on the top to control media playback.