Google is finally selling a new smart speaker again, and this one is built around Gemini for Home rather than the old Assistant-era playbook. The Google Home Speaker is up for preorder now, costs $99, and arrives on June 25 – a modest price for a device that is clearly trying to make smart speakers feel less like timers with opinions and more like actual conversational hardware.
That pitch matters because the smart speaker category has spent years going sideways. Amazon has kept shipping Echo hardware, while Google mostly let its Nest lineup age in place; now the company is betting that better AI behavior, not just louder sound, is what gets people to upgrade.
Google Home Speaker hardware and colors
Compared with Google’s last smart speaker from 2020, the new model adds 360-degree sound, support for pairing two units with the Google TV Streamer for stereo audio, and a 3D-knit textile mesh cover. It also comes in porcelain, hazel, jade, and berry, which is the sort of color name that sounds cute until you imagine explaining it to your living room.
The sound upgrade should matter more here than it did on the Nest Mini, which technically supported 360-degree audio but was always too small to take the idea seriously. Google seems to know that a speaker people can hear from anywhere in the room is easier to sell than one that mainly serves as a voice-command puck.
Gemini for Home is the real product
The bigger story is Gemini for Home, which Google says brings custom processing for more advanced voice features. That includes Gemini Live for real-time back-and-forth conversations without repeating the wake word, natural-language searching of camera feeds, and better handling of multi-step commands and mid-sentence corrections. In other words, Google is trying to fix the part of smart home control that has always felt one command away from a tantrum.
- Price: $99
- Availability: preorder now, on sale June 25
- Audio: 360-degree sound, stereo pairing with Google TV Streamer
- Colors: porcelain, hazel, jade, berry
Google Home Premium puts the best features behind a paywall
There’s a catch, because of course there is. Searching camera events, using Gemini Live, and getting Home Brief all require Google Home Premium. The standard plan costs $10 per month, while the advanced version costs $20 per month and adds 24/7 recording through Nest cameras plus 60 days of event history instead of 30.
That subscription split is the most revealing part of Google’s strategy: the hardware is cheap enough to feel accessible, but the smarter features are what the company wants to monetize. If Gemini for Home works as advertised, the speaker may finally feel like an upgrade rather than a refresh for people still hanging on to older Nest gear. If not, it’s just another pretty cylinder waiting for the next software patch to save it.