Google Home speaker debuts with Gemini, but voice AI falls short of the hype
Google's new Home speaker pairs solid hardware with Gemini voice assistant, though early reviews say the AI capabilities still fall short of justifying a smart speaker upgrade.
"Smart speakers need AI to justify taking up counter space," industry observers say—and Google's new Home speaker suggests the hardware is ready, but the software isn't.
The company's new Google Home speaker, reviewed this week, pairs capable hardware with direct Gemini integration. The speaker itself earns praise for audio quality and build, but the voice assistant experience remains uneven. Gemini's conversational promise—longer exchanges, contextual follow-ups, nuanced responses—hasn't translated into a kitchen-counter use case that feels materially better than the Assistant it replaces.
Smart speakers peaked in hype around 2018, then spent years iterating on the same feature set: music streaming, weather queries, smart home toggles, kitchen timers. Sales flattened. The category needed a reason for existing beyond novelty, and the industry consensus landed on large language models as the answer. If an LLM could handle open-ended questions, remember context across a conversation, and pull from broader knowledge than a rules-based assistant, maybe the hardware would finally justify counter space.
Amazon rolled out its own AI-upgraded Alexa hardware last fall, setting the stage for a head-to-head battle over whether foundation models can rescue the smart speaker category from feature stagnation. Google's entry suggests the hardware is ready; the software still needs another lap. The Home speaker is available now, with Gemini enabled by default for new setups. Both Amazon and Google are routing queries through cloud inference rather than running capable LLMs on-device—a trade-off that introduces latency, costs, and the same content-filtering constraints that hobble closed APIs. Local models like Llama 3.1 and Qwen can run unrestricted voice workflows on modest hardware, but integrating them into a polished consumer product remains a DIY affair. Google's stumble underscores the distance between a working demo and a product people actually want to use every day.
