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It’s been a while since Google updated its smart speaker lineup, the company preferring to focus on its AI and smartphone offerings, but the Google Home Speaker has finally arrived and it has been designed from the ground up with the new Gemini for Home voice assistant in mind.
The new speaker, which will cost £100, features 360-degree audio, has support for stereo and home-theatre pairing (only with a Google TV Streamer, though), and it comes in two colourways: an off-white “porcelain” and a dark green “hazel”. It’s designed to replace the Google Nest mini, but it’s a much beefier speaker, measuring around a centimetre wider, and more than double the height and weight.
Like Amazon’s Echo speakers, it has a light-ring around the base that pulses when it’s “thinking” or processing voice commands, and it keeps up the Google Nest speaker theme of having capacitive touch controls on top of the speaker. There are three zones located on the top surface of the speaker, that allow you to play, pause and skip audio.
Inside, it has a 2GHz quad-core A55-based processor with an NPU, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of storage. There’s support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and the speaker includes a Thread border router, allowing it to become part of a Matter smart home system.
Plus, with a 58mm full-range, 360-degree speaker driver inside – double the size of the Nest mini’s – Google says it has much better sound quality; specifically, “2.5x stronger bass”. Whether it can match up to the quality of Amazon’s Echo speakers is another question. We’ll report back when we’ve had the chance to listen to one ourselves. It also has three far-field microphones and a hardware mute switch.
Google Home Speaker specifications
| Colours | Porecelain, Hazel (Jade and Berry options only available in the US) |
| Power output | 30W |
| Dimensions (WDH) | 107 x 107 x 87mm |
| Weight | 396g |
| Memory and storage | 1GB RAM, 4GB storage |
| Processor | 2GHz Quad-core A55 with NPU |
| Wireless connectivity | Dual-band Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, Thread 1.3 border router |
Gemini for home
Aside from the hardware, though, the most important thing about the new Google Home Speaker, is that it’s the first to come with Gemini for Home installed as the default voice assistant. This is a Google’s rival to Alexa+. It comes with more natural-sounding voices, more conversational interactions, and the ability to complete multiple interactions in one question.
It also has shortterm memory of “about an hour”, so you shouldn’t need to restate questions you’ve already asked recently. And there’s integration here with various elements of your smart home, too. You can have the speaker create AI descriptions of camera-based video alerts, ask it to describe what your speakers saw overnight and what it’s seeing right now. It’s also possible to ask Gemini for Home to create complex automations simply by asking.
However, as we’ve come to expect from other products featuring AI, not all the advanced AI-based features will be free to those customers purchasing the speaker.
Notably, the camera features described above will only be available to those purchasing the Advanced plan and that will cost a rather expensive £16 per month. The “Help me create” feature for automations, meanwhile, will only be accessible to those paying £8 per month for the Standard plan.
And while the new Home Assistant is free to access, continuous conversation via Gemini Live will again only available to those paying £8 per month.
Google hopes to persuade customers to pay for the premium offering by including a six-month trial with the speaker, but after that it’s going to have to be seriously impressive to keep people on such a pricey subscription, when Amazon is including Alexa+ with a Prime subscription.
Tempted? You can pre-order the new Google Home Speaker from the Google Store from 2pm on 17 June 2026 and we’ll have a review of it and its Gemini for Home offering very soon.
