Google's $100 Home Speaker Swaps Assistant for Gemini

Google has launched an all-new Google Home Speaker for $100, with preorders open as of June 17 and units shipping June 25. It is Google's first fresh smart speaker in six years and a direct replacement for the Nest Audio, but the headline change isn't the hardware — it's that Gemini now runs the show instead of Google Assistant.

On the hardware side, the speaker has a compact body wrapped in a 3D-knit fabric made from recycled materials, an LED ring around the base that replaces the old indicator lights, and what Google calls clear 360-degree audio rather than sound aimed in one direction. Pair two of them and you get stereo; pair one with a Google TV Streamer and it handles stereo audio during video. It comes in four colors — hazel, porcelain, jade and berry.

1Gemini is the actual upgrade

The reason this matters is the assistant. With Gemini in place of Google Assistant, the speaker handles multi-step commands in a single breath — Google's own example is dimming all the lights in a room, playing music and setting a timer from one query. It also has better contextual understanding and extended short-term memory, so you don't have to say the wake word and re-explain yourself every single time. For anyone who has snapped at a smart speaker for losing the thread mid-sentence, that's the part that changes the daily experience.

There's a catch worth naming: the best bits are paywalled. Google Home Premium, at $10 to $20 a month, is what unlocks live back-and-forth Gemini conversations, AI Home Brief summaries, and the more advanced automation and notifications. The $100 buys you the box and the basics; the conversational, genuinely-assistant-like behavior is a subscription.

2Why this matters for you

I've watched the smart-speaker category sit basically frozen for years — the old Assistant got good at timers and weather and then stopped getting interesting. Putting a real language model in the room is the first thing in a long time that could make these devices feel less like a voice remote and more like something you can actually talk to. My honest take: the 360-degree audio and recycled fabric are nice, but they're not why you'd buy this. You'd buy it to see whether Gemini in your kitchen is finally good enough to trust with a string of instructions. The risk is the subscription — a $100 speaker that needs a $10–20 monthly plan to be its best self is a different value proposition than the price tag suggests, and you should decide which version you're actually buying.