Google Launches $99.99 Home Speaker With Gemini, but AI Stumbles After 6-Year Gap
Updated
Updated · The Verge · Jul 1
Google Launches $99.99 Home Speaker With Gemini, but AI Stumbles After 6-Year Gap
3 articles · Updated · The Verge · Jul 1
Summary
Google’s first new smart speaker in six years pairs solid $99.99 hardware with Gemini for Home, but the assistant often feels unfinished, slow and unreliable in real use.
10-second delays hit both cloud and even some local commands, while Gemini sometimes played the wrong song, failed TV requests and demanded voice verification mid-task despite Voice Match being set up.
Hardware is the stronger sell: the compact speaker offers good sound for its size, responsive microphones, Matter control, Thread border routing and Google TV Streamer pairing, though it trails the older Nest Audio on audio quality.
Gemini still shows strengths in natural-language control and general knowledge, handling multi-step home requests and conversational prompts better than Google Assistant did.
Google also puts some AI features behind subscriptions starting at $10 a month, leaving the new speaker looking like a capable smart-home hub whose software has not yet caught up.