Google is releasing the Google Home Speaker on June 25, 2026 — its first new smart speaker hardware in over five years and the company's first device built from the ground up around Gemini. Pre-orders opened June 17 across Google's store and Best Buy in 18 countries at $99.99. Every unit purchased before September 30 includes six months of Google Home Premium, a $60 subscription normally priced at $10 per month.
The Long Wait, Explained
The existing Nest Mini (2019) and Nest Audio (2020) have been on sale without an update for five and six years, respectively. During that time Google overhauled its AI strategy wholesale, retiring Google Assistant in favor of Gemini on Pixel phones and eventually across all its products. Rather than push Gemini onto legacy hardware through a software update, Google held the new speaker until it had optimized Gemini for the device's on-device NPU — a choice that reduced conversational latency to a point where Gemini Live feels genuinely natural for back-and-forth voice exchanges. The Shortcut noted that Google had teased the product nearly a year earlier before delaying launch specifically to improve Gemini performance.
Hardware Specifications
The speaker measures 4.2 inches in diameter and 3.4 inches in height — more compact than the Nest Audio but a meaningful step up from the Nest Mini. Inside is a 58mm full-range driver (twice the diameter of the Nest Mini's driver) flanked by passive radiators for 360-degree omnidirectional output. Google quotes 2.5 times stronger bass than the Nest Mini. The processor is a quad-core 2.0 GHz A55 with an NPU. On-board memory is 1GB RAM and 4GB storage.
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.4, and Thread 1.3. The Thread support makes each Home Speaker a border router node, expanding the home's Thread mesh with every additional unit and enabling fast, low-latency communication with Matter devices. Three far-field microphones handle voice pickup at distance, with a physical mute toggle for privacy. An activity light ring at the base glows to signal when Gemini is listening, thinking, or responding. Touch controls on the top surface handle volume and playback.
Power comes through a USB-C port with a 1.5-meter cable and a 30W adapter in the box. The unit ships in four colors: Porcelain and Hazel globally, with Jade and Berry exclusive to US buyers.
Gemini and Google Home Premium
The baseline voice experience — music playback, timers, smart home control, weather, questions — works without a subscription. The deeper conversational feature, Gemini Live, requires Google Home Premium ($10/month after the six-month trial). Gemini Live enables multi-turn spoken conversations rather than single-command interactions: Google claims the Home Speaker can "handle multiple commands in one request, understand corrections mid-sentence, and answer complex questions" through Gemini. Additional features tied to Premium include Camera History Search and Home Briefs — a daily summary of your home's status and calendar events.
Multi-Room and Surround Audio
Two or more Google Home Speakers can pair for stereo playback across a room. Paired with a Google TV Streamer, they form a surround sound setup alongside other Nest Audio devices. The speaker is backward-compatible with existing Cast audio products for multi-room audio.
What This Means for the Market
The Home Speaker arrives as Amazon continues to iterate the Echo lineup and Apple's HomePod mini holds the $99 price point with Siri. At the same $99, Google is directly competing on price while betting its Gemini assistant — and the six-month Premium bundle — gives buyers more conversational capability out of the box than its rivals. The Google TV Streamer integration is a pull for households already using Google's streaming hardware. For buyers willing to pay $10/month after the trial, the total first-year investment is $99 hardware with $60 in subscription value included.
