The Google Home Speaker is a slap in the face to Nest Audio users

Google is completely revamping its smart home ecosystem around Gemini, and a tiny orb will be the face of the overhaul. It’s the Google Home Speaker, a spherical and stylish speaker that’s made to fit in anywhere in your home. You can use it as a Gemini-powered assistant, a home listening station, or as a stereo pair for your Google TV Streamer. In isolation, the Google Home Speaker looks incredible.

And yet, some of the Home Speaker’s best software features won’t make their way to Nest Audio users, forcing them to watch from the sidelines with no clear upgrade path available.

Google’s smart speaker lineup has historically offered something for everyone. There was the Home Mini and Nest Mini in the budget realm, the Google Home and Nest Audio in the middle, and the high-end Google Home Max at the top. These smart speakers didn’t all coexist, and Google discontinued certain models without a direct replacement. However, Google is focusing solely on the new Home Speaker in a way we haven’t seen since the original Google Home debuted in 2016.

Going all-in on the Google Home Speaker is a risk, no matter how good it is. Buyers value sound quality differently, so a single speaker offering doesn’t make sense. The Home Speaker might be too good for Nest Mini owners, but too bad for Nest Audio or Home Max owners.

Amazon, one of Google’s top home competitors, has a gigantic lineup of smart speakers targeting multiple price points and use cases. Even Apple, known for treating digital assistants and the smart home as afterthoughts, has two smart speakers: the second-generation HomePod and the HomePod Mini. With the Nest Mini and Nest Audio speakers seemingly going away, the Home Speaker has its work cut out for it.

Honestly, if the Home Speaker is designed to compete with the HomePod Mini, I like Google’s chances. But the Home Speaker isn’t a perfect successor to the Nest Mini or Nest Audio — it’s something new altogether. If you’ve never owned a Google Home or Nest smart speaker, the Home Speaker looks enticing. Compared to other Google speakers, things get weird.

The Home Speaker has an audio driver that’s twice the size of the Nest Mini’s, but it also costs twice as much. The Home Speaker costs the same as the Nest Audio when it launched, but it’s smaller and can’t match its sound quality.

Google described the Home Speaker’s sound quality as falling between that of the Nest Mini and Nest Audio. I asked Google if the Home Speaker would be an upgrade or a downgrade for Nest Audio owners, and a spokesperson explained the following:

We designed Google Home Speaker to have a compact size with 360 audio so that it can seamlessly blend into any room with flexible placement. This allows users to place Google Home Speaker wherever it is needed, vs. Nest Audio which is a directionally oriented speaker.

The spokesperson added that the Google Home Speaker’s audio “punches above its weight,” with the power to fill mid-sized rooms. More importantly, compared to the Nest Audio, the Home Speaker provides “better Gemini comprehension and responsiveness with its far-field microphones and AI engine.”

This confirms what I suspected — the Home Speaker’s smarts are what make it great. It has a quad-core A55 2.0GHz processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) for on-device AI and a gigabyte of memory. It’s the first Google smart speaker built for the Gemini era. If you care about sound quality, as many Nest Audio users do, the Home Speaker may not be for you.

When Gemini first hit Home and Nest hardware, Google was gracious. It replaced Google Assistant with Gemini for every speaker it released in the last decade, down to the original Google Home. Google even made Gemini available to third-party Google Assistant speakers and displays, something it hadn’t originally committed to. The Google Home Speaker launch is different. Home Speaker comes with exclusive software features, and they’re not making their way to the Nest Mini or Nest Audio.

If you buy two Home Speakers, you can combine them as a stereo pair. You can also combine Home Speakers with Nest speakers and displays to form custom speaker groups. That isn’t new — the upgrade is how the Home Speaker pairs with the Google TV Streamer to form a home theater setup.

Previously, you could add the TV Streamer, Google Cast-enabled devices, and Nest speakers or displays to a custom group. A stereo pair of Nest Audio speakers couldn’t serve as the default output for a TV Streamer, though. Some users tried using a Nest Audio stereo pair in Bluetooth mode as an audio output for their TV Streamer, but, as expected, ran into latency issues that made for a disjointed experience.

Google is addressing this oversight with the Home Speaker, as two of them can be combined to form a stereo output for the Google TV Streamer. A new software protocol makes this possible, with the Home Speaker stereo pair connecting with the TV Speaker over Wi-Fi to deliver high-definition audio. Dolby Atmos and other Dolby surround sound formats are supported, so two Home Speakers make for a spatial movie-watching experience when paired with a TV Streamer.

Google says that the Google TV Streamer “converts HD audio to a proprietary spatial audio format to deliver immersive cinematic sound out of just two Google Home Speakers.” So, the TV Streamer and fresh software are handling most of the heavy lifting here. With that in mind, why can’t the Nest Audio — which likely delivers better sound quality than the Home Speaker — be used in the same way?

I asked Google about this, and a spokesperson confirmed there isn’t a hardware limitation preventing the Nest Audio from being used in the same way. “As we continue to evolve our hardware offerings, we’ve designed Google Home Speaker to have our latest, most advanced software capabilities,” the Google spokesperson said.

It isn’t unusual for new hardware products to ship with exclusive software features. That doesn’t make this any less of a predicament for Nest Audio users, though. They have a choice: keep their better-sounding Nest Audio speakers without the new software, or upgrade for TV Streamer stereo pair support and accept the quality hit.

When you buy a smart speaker, you’re buying into an ecosystem. It’s a commitment that extends beyond the $50 or $100 it initially costs to buy a Nest Mini or Nest Audio. That’s why it’s frustrating to see the Nest Audio, with a large 75mm woofer and 19mm tweeter that’ll sound better than the full-range 58mm driver in the Home Speaker, miss out on software improvements.

Nest Audio users shouldn’t have to sacrifice speaker quality to get Google TV Streamer support. If the new Home Speaker matched or beat the Nest Audio in terms of sound quality, I wouldn’t be as disappointed. But with no clear Nest Audio replacement or upgrade pick in sight, the omissions are glaring.