Only one is truly intelligent

I use the Google Home and Apple Home ecosystems, and that means I’ve used my fair share of smart speakers and displays. I’ve let the Nest Mini, Nest Hub Max, HomePod Mini, and HomePod 2 They all power my home, and now it’s Google Home Speaker’s turn. Google’s new smart speaker sells for $99matching the price of Apple’s HomePod Mini. So, I put both orb-shaped speakers in my living room for a week, testing their abilities as speakers and digital assistants.

It’s easy to forget that the HomePod Mini is almost six years old. Given the age of the smart speaker, I expected the Home Speaker to handily surpass it. That didn’t turn out to be the case. The Home Speaker is certainly smarter, but the HomePod Mini sounded better. That said, if you need a smart speaker to control your smart home, play casual music, and everything else, there’s only one option I recommend.

If you’ve had a Google Home or Nest speaker in the past, there’s something you need to understand about the Home Speaker right off the bat. Although it costs the same as the Nest Audio before, it is a completely different product. The Home Speaker is about half the size, uses a single driver, and puts more emphasis on the “smart” part of being a smart speaker. This is not a successor to Nest AudioIt is an alternative to the HomePod Mini.

Starting with the specifications, the Google Home Speaker uses a 58mm full-range driver with omnidirectional sound. Apple doesn’t announce the size of the HomePod Mini’s full-range driver, but it’s said to measure around 50mm. That passes the eye test, as the Home Speaker is slightly larger than the HomePod Mini. Both speakers can fit on any desk, table, or shelf since they are small. 360-degree sound means you don’t have to worry too much about speaker placement.

The similar size made me think these speakers would sound similar, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I used Apple Music to stream songs through both speakers, controlling them using my voice and its companion apps. The volume of the Google Home Speaker immediately impressed me. I would listen to songs at 10% or 20% volume and that would fill my medium sized living room. If I turned it up to about three-quarters or maximum volume, the sound permeated my entire one-bedroom apartment.

The sound profile of the HomePod Mini was completely different. I needed to turn the volume up to 50% or 75% for a comfortable listening experience, but it still wasn’t enough. I’d go so far as to say that the HomePod Mini works well on a desk, but you need a stereo pair to adequately fill a room.

That doubles the installation cost and the Home Speaker can also be used as a stereo pair. So if you have the budget to spend $200 on a pair of smart speakers, you can buy two Google speakers and get louder, fuller sound than a HomePod Mini stereo pair can offer.

The problem is that I prefer the sound signature of the HomePod Mini to the dynamics of the Home Speaker, any day. Neither speaker has the driver size needed to deliver incredible bass, and the Home Speaker, especially, produced muddy kick drum beats. Where the HomePod Mini separated itself from the Home Speaker was in the mid and high areas of the soundstage. Vocals, drums, and cymbals sounded crisper and more defined through the HomePod Mini, while the Home Speaker sounded tinny.

That tinny sound only got worse as the Home Speaker’s volume increased, and beyond 80% it reached uncomfortable levels of distortion. It’s worth emphasizing that the Home Speaker can be twice as loud as the HomePod Mini. The question is whether you are interested in the room-filling sound or the precise details. This is a $99 smart speaker and I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience for this type of speaker prefers the former.

You can set two HomePod Mini speakers as the default stereo output for Apple TV 4K, and you can do the same using two home speakers with the google tv transmitter. In any case, you will get a low latency connection and spatial audio support. I only got a Home Speaker review unit and wasn’t able to test it first-hand, but I would expect a stereo pair to connect seamlessly to the TV Streamer and provide soundbar-like audio quality.

Home Speaker is Google’s first smart home speaker built for Gemini, and it shows. Meanwhile, the HomePod Mini uses the same Siri it debuted half a decade ago. That’s not a compliment and Apple hasn’t confirmed whether HomePod speakers will ever receive it. updated to new Siri AI.

Both speakers rely heavily on the cloud, but the HomePod Mini has the older Apple S5 chip found in the Apple Watch Series 5, which doesn’t have Siri AI. The Home Speaker has a 2.0 GHz quad-core A55 processor and a neural processing unit (NPU), which presumably makes it better for on-device processing. When testing both side by side with identical questions and requests, the Home Speaker is clearly better.

There were a few times where the Home Speaker and HomePod Mini returned similar answers to basic questions, like how grass-fed meat is different from grain-fed meat. Most of the time, the HomePod Mini defaulted to displaying web results that I had to pull off my iPhone to view. I asked each speaker to explain the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning, and the HomePod Mini couldn’t do it. The Interior spokesman recited the response clearly and concisely.

It’s true that it takes a few seconds for the Gemini to respond through the Home Speaker or monitor your home, but the delay never felt unsustainable. I would say a command like “Turn the air conditioning to 75 degrees” and continue with whatever I was doing; The air conditioning turned on in 10 seconds. Have Google Nest Camerasand I was able to ask the Home Speaker exactly when a package was delivered. He responded with the delivery time and the company that delivered it, which is incredibly helpful.

I found the Home Speaker to be much smarter than the HomePod Mini, but it’s not as smart as Google claims. I asked both speakers to create a new to-do list and add multiple tasks to it, all with a single command. The Home Speaker did it, while the HomePod Mini said it couldn’t. Later, my partner tried to use the Home Speaker to add another task to the list, but called it a “checklist” instead of a “to-do list.” That time it failed.

I gave the Home Speaker and HomePod Mini access to the same tools. I paired the Home Speaker with a Nest Cam Indoor and the HomePod Mini with a HomeKit Secure Video camera. When the HomePod Mini didn’t answer the same questions about my camera history, it was only because Siri isn’t as smart or robust as the Gemini. Something similar happened with audio playback. My A/V receiver supports both Google Cast and AirPlay 2, but only the Home Speaker could stream music through my sound system on demand.

If you want “smart” in a smart speaker and plan to buy an ecosystem, the Google Home Speaker is undoubtedly the best buy. Apple’s HomePod Mini is for those who want the “speaker” in a smart speaker and don’t care about smart features.