Google's $100 Gemini-powered Home Speaker lands June 25 after six-year drought

Google has ended its longest-ever smart-speaker silence. The Google Home Speaker, announced last August, goes up for preorder today and hits shelves on June 25 in the US, Italy, and Spain. It is the first audio device built from the ground up around Gemini for Home, the company's generative-AI replacement for the ageing Google Assistant.

The hardware after six years

The new speaker is a compact oblate spheroid wrapped in recycled 3D-knit fabric, offered in hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (the last two are US exclusives). A glowing light ring at the base signals listening, thinking, or responding. Inside, a quad-core A55 processor clocked at 2 GHz with a dedicated NPU runs local AI models for noise cancellation, echo suppression, and sound separation. The single 58 mm full-range driver delivers 360-degree sound and roughly 2.5 times the bass of the Nest Mini, but Google concedes audio quality falls between the Nest Mini and the 2020 Nest Audio, which packed a 75 mm woofer and a 19 mm tweeter.

“a massive audio upgrade over the Nest Mini.”

Three far-field microphones work with the local processing, and a physical mute switch cuts the mics entirely. Capacitive touch controls on top handle media playback without voice. The device can pair in stereo with a second unit or connect to a Google TV Streamer for spatial surround sound, a first for Google's smart speakers. It also acts as a Matter controller and Thread border router, though it ships with Thread 1.3 rather than the newer 1.4 specification.

Gemini for Home and natural conversation

Gemini for Home discards the rigid command syntax of Assistant. Users can chain multiple requests in one sentence, change their mind mid-utterance, and ask follow-ups without repeating the wake word, thanks to Continued Conversation, now available in all supported languages. The assistant handles relational logic such as “turn off all lights except the bedside lamp” and performs multi-step reasoning: asking for the weather at the next match of a favorite team prompts Gemini to first find the fixture's date and location before pulling the forecast.

“the speaker runs local models for noise cancellation, echo suppression, and sound separation to ensure Gemini can hear commands despite background noise.”

The system maintains short-term memory across turns, letting users drill deeper without re-establishing context. Google says it has applied more than 2,500 fixes since the October early-access launch, and 3.5 million homes have opted in.

The subscription catch

The $99.99 sticker price covers basic conversation, quick answers, and smart-home control. Gemini Live's free-flowing chat, Camera History Search for Nest cameras, and Home Briefs that summarise daily events all sit behind Google Home Premium, which costs $10 a month (or $20 for the tier with 24/7 camera recording). Every speaker ships with six free months of Premium; after that, the features many buyers want become a recurring bill.

Availability and pricing

Preorders opened June 17 on the Google Store. In the United States the speaker costs $99.99. In Italy and Spain it lists at €119.99. Most sources report general availability on June 25, though The Verge says shipping does not begin until June 29. Google is offering the six-month Premium trial to anyone who purchases before September 30, 2026.