The last time Google released a smart speaker, the world was in the throes of a pandemic. Yes, it's been six years since the company trotted out a dedicated speaker.

However, this newest Google Home Speaker brings a big change with it: The device has been redesigned to showcase the new Gemini assistant instead of the Google Assistant that powered all previous speakers and smart displays.

Google announced the speaker last fall alongside new Nest smart home cameras and video doorbells, promising a spring 2026 launch. We're well into summer now, but it's finally go time.

The company today announced that preorders for the Google Home Speaker start June 17, with official sales kicking off June 25. It costs $100 and comes in Berry, Jade, Hazel, and Porcelain, though the first two colors are exclusive to the US.

The experience of using it should feel familiar if you’ve owned other smart speakers. You wake Gemini through the "Hey, Google" hot word and ask it questions. But Gemini is leaps and bounds better than the old Google Assistant at understanding natural conversation, so your queries do not need to be as rigid, and you won’t need to ask things in multiple ways to get what you want. Even if you make an error in your original ask, you can stop and rephrase your question midway through—just like you would if you were talking to a human—and Gemini will understand your intent.

You can string multiple commands in one sentence, and Gemini should be able to take care of them. You can be hyper-specific—turn off all the lights except my bedside lamp—and it'll parse it through. You can ask follow-up conversations without having to bring up the original context all over again; like with the Google Assistant speakers, the microphone stays on for a brief window after Gemini answers a question so that you can ask a follow-up without having to say the wake phrase again. This feature, called Continued Conversation, had been available only in English on the Assistant-powered speakers, but the feature has expanded to all supported languages.

If you have security cameras, you can use Gemini to ask specifically about anything the cameras might have seen, like “Did FedEx drop a package off today?” or “Did the dog eat a cookie off the counter?” You don't need the Google Home Speaker for this specific feature—if you've opted into Gemini for your existing Google Home, it's already available—though its inclusion here is a nice convenience.

As for what Gemini sounds like, there are 10 voices to choose from. You can also trigger Gemini Live—while Gemini expanded to older smart speakers last fall, this “Live” capability is restricted to newer devices like the Nest Audio and Google Home Speaker. Enter this mode by saying, “Hey Google, let's talk,” and you can have a back-and-forth conversation with Gemini; no need to pause and say the wake word.

The caveat is that the Gemini Live experience is available only if you subscribe to Google Home Premium. (Anyone who buys the Google Home Speaker gets six months of this service for free.) Other subscription perks include the ability to easily set up automations with natural language, 30 days of event video history, and smarter notifications from security cameras. (There's another Advanced tier that unlocks even more.)

Anish Kattukaran, chief product officer at Google Nest and Google Home, says the speaker runs local models that better isolate sound, meaning the Google Home Speaker will filter out background noise to better identify when you're talking to it. Also new is a glowing ring of lights at the base of the speaker that lights up the surface around it, making it easier to identify when the speaker is listening or churning through a request.

(Google seems to be bringing back these kinds of LED visual indicators. Its upcoming Googlebooks platform will have dedicated Glow Bars, and rumors indicate its next Pixel phones may feature something similar.)

The Google Home Speaker's orb design, much like Amazon's new Echo speakers and Apple's aging HomePod Mini, offers “balanced” 360-degree audio. It also lets you place the speaker anywhere in the room, and it should still deliver robust audio quality even from spots that aren’t acoustically ideal. Kattukaran also says the company intentionally designed it to be significantly more compact than the previous Nest Audio, so it's easier to find a place for it to sit. But at the end of the day, this is a smaller speaker, so audio quality likely won't be as strong as larger speakers. Instead, Google says, the Home Speaker is a “massive audio upgrade” over the diminutive Nest Mini, with a driver that’s twice as large and bass that’s much more powerful.

You can pair two Google Home Speakers with the company's Google TV Streamer for an approximation of surround sound, though this capability isn't available yet for other products—like TVs with built-in Google TV—that seem as though they should be able to support such an integration. You can still create speaker groupings in the Google Home app and cast music or podcasts to the speaker, just like with the company's older products.

The speaker supports the Thread and Matter standards, so you can use it as a hub to set up other Matter-enabled smart home devices. (It supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4.) There are capacitive touch controls on top, three far-field microphones for talking to Gemini, and crucially, a hardware mute switch so Gemini can’t listen.

Kattukaran says ever since Google opened early access for Gemini in Google Home last fall, more than 3.5 million homes have opted into the experience across 20 countries in more than 10 languages. That also means the company has received “tons of feedback” and has delivered more than 2,500 bug fixes to Gemini and Google Home. Overall, Kattukaran says, Google is focusing on faster updates to deliver fixes and new features and that most people are engaging twice as much with Gemini versus Google Assistant. That could be partly due to a period of decline with Assistant, when several features broke as Google transitioned to Gemini.

Apple is expected to debut a revamped smart speaker later this year, now that the company seems to have finally figured out a way to make Siri better. And with Alexa+ still rolling out globally to Echo devices, 10 years after they debuted, the smart speaker wars are once again heating up.