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The Home Mini is the cheapest way of buying into the Assistant yet for those looking to buy into Google’s smart home ecosystem. While it's a good value for the price, its poor sound performance makes it a better desk buddy than a standalone speaker. While there are privacy concerns with a device like Google Home Mini that is always listening for a wake word, Google is fairly transparent with what it records.
Just start with “Hey Google” to get answers from your Google Assistant, tackle your day, enjoy music or TV shows, and control your compatible smart home devices. And with Voice Match, the Assistant can tell your voice from others—up to six people can get personal assistance on each device. Google Nest Hub brings you visual help for any moment at home. With the Google Assistant built-in, use your voice to view your latest events and reminders, and control compatible smart devices from a single dashboard. Ask questions, and get visual, immersive answers from Google, and helpful videos from YouTube. Plus, play your favorite songs on a crystal-clear speaker, and relive your memories with Google Photos.
Get help with the little moments, so you can enjoy the big moments. That means that the Home Mini is exactly like the larger, more expensive Google Home and even the much more powerful Google Home Max in that it can control your smart home devices. While the others make for very solid standalone speakers from a performance standpoint, the Home Mini can’t hold its own as the sole sound-maker in your house. Since the Google Home Mini has all of the same functionality as the Google Home, it makes a good entry-level smart speaker. With a very affordable price point, you can pick up a Home Mini and try it out to see if you could benefit from having smart speakers in your home without spending a lot of money.
Typically, you can find the Google Home Mini for slightly cheaper than the Google Nest Mini since it’s an older model, but the second-generation version offers faster response times and better sound quality. Small speakers like the Mini aren't going to replace your full-scale home audio setup anytime soon. Still, Google made a point of saying that people would be surprised by how much sound the Mini can put out. Sure enough, it sounded stronger than I expected -- and noticeably stronger than the Echo Dot -- as I began testing it out. Both assistants -- and thus both speakers -- are very capable at this point and will adequately respond to most questions and commands you can think to throw at them.
Google Store
In terms of functionality, the Home Mini and Nest Mini are identical. They answer all the same queries and commands, and they work with all of the same devices and apps. The Nest Mini is slightly smaller than the Home Mini, but the difference is minute enough that it barely matters. Nest is a company that Google purchased and folded into their own line of smart devices. The Nest name has subsequently been attached to various devices, including an improved version of the Google Home Mini.
The Echo Dot was able to respond to noticeably lower levels than the Mini. It's a small thing, but it might make the Echo Dot the better pick for quiet talkers. One other small concern -- from a distance, it isn't always easy to see the indicator lights on the top of the device that tell you it's ready for a command.
Questions?
Both get you reliably when you say “Hey Google” — and can even distinguish your voice from others in your home for a truly personalized experience. You've got yourself one of Google's adorable Home Mini smart speakers, but now that you've unpacked the box and plugged it in, you're trying to figure out how to get the whole thing set up. If you like falling asleep to music or white noise, but you don’t want it to be playing all night, just say, “Hey Google, set a sleep timer for one hour,” once the sound is playing. As a smart speaker, your Google Nest Mini can connect to your Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube music, or TuneIn playlists to keep your space jamming all day long. From setting reminders to paying for your favorite music, a Google Nest Mini smart speaker can help you manage your days with ease.
Google Nest Hub
About the size of a donut, it has all the smarts of the Google Assistant and gives you hands-free help in any room of your house. Starting today, you can grab it online from the Google Store or online or on shelves of Best Buy, Walmart, Target and other stores. Google Nest Hub Max with the Google Assistant helps your busy family stay in touch and on track. Check in on home when you’re away with the built-in Nest Cam. Everyone sees their own calendar, commute, and more with just a glance. And enjoy Google Photos, YouTube TV, videos, and music on the 10-inch HD screen with stereo speakers.
What is the Nest Mini?
But, on its own, the Google Home Mini shouldn’t be used as much more than a desk buddy. It’s more than enough if you’re simply using it to get a glimpse at your calendar, hear the latest news or phone a friend with its free voice calling . But if you’re looking for something that will faithfully reproduce your favorite music, this isn’t the best solution out there.
When it comes to deciding between Google smart speakers, you may be wondering, "What does a Google Nest Mini do?" Here are 14 things you probably didn't think this small smart speaker could do. That said, the Home Mini used a micro-USB port instead of a barrel plug connector, and some people preferred that approach. At launch, a hardware issue emerged where the top cover was prone to activating Assistant, thus leading to accidental voice recordings. Google disabled the feature entirely, but later added the ability to play/pause (start/stop) by long-pressing the volume buttons. Since mid-November, both have been discounted to $24.99.
With the Echo Dot, Alexa's voice is a little tinny-sounding, and music playback not much better than what you'd get from your phone. By comparison, the Home Mini makes the Google Assistant sound warmer and more natural. Music playback was more passable with the Home Mini, too -- though, like the Dot, you really shouldn't plan on using it for anything more than close-range, casual listening. The Google Home Mini puts all of the smarts of Google Assistant into a small and affordable package. The Mini sounds surprisingly good for its size and features a colorful design that can blend into your home's decor.
The beauty of having more than one Google Assistant-enabled speaker throughout your home is that when you have an announcement you want to make to your entire brood, you don’t have to yell it down the halls. You can even start your robot vacuum and dictate which rooms in the house you want audio to play in. Its in-store longevity could have been due to Google making too many at launch, and you will undoubtedly find a handful on store shelves if you still really want one. That said, the Home Mini does not appear on Best Buy or Target online stores today. The one exception was my "limbo" test, where I try to wake each speaker from roughly 20 feet across the room using an increasingly quiet voice.
The Google Home Mini is ready to take its place alongside the Dot as one of the best affordable smart speakers out there. In terms of what the Home Mini can take control of, the list goes on. It can send a request to pull up a YouTube video over to your Chromecast to effortlessly begin viewing. The Home Mini is also a smart home hub in that it can also integrate with Internet of Things devices from the likes of TP-Link, Philips Hue, Wemo and more. If you've never used a smart speaker, but you want to try it out without paying for an expensive Google Home or Google Home Max, then the Home Mini is a great affordable option. The Google Home Mini is also an excellent addition to any home that already has one or more Google Home devices.
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The Google Assistant uses the power of Google's search engine to handle tough, specific questions better than Alexa does. It's an oblong orb of plastic and fabric with no visible buttons, save for a slider to mute the microphone that's hidden in the back. It comes in your choice of three colors -- chalk , charcoal , or coral . Exposing its bottom, you can see a circular rubber mat to keep still on whichever surface that you place it on. Google provided TechRadar with a coral (peach-colored) model, but the Home Mini is also available in chalk or charcoal .
Speaking of Cast, Google’s latest speaker works best within a crowd of other Cast-enabled devices. In my studio apartment, I grouped together a Google Home, a Chromecast Audio-connected soundbar and the Google Home Mini to build a surround-sound setup. When in this grouping, the Home Mini stood out as the star of the highs, pushing the vocals through extra hard when the larger Home was more focused on the mids. If you want to solely use the Home Mini as a set of Bluetooth speakers, the Google Home app offers up pairing settings, though they are rather buried within the app. Vocals and the like chime through clearly, but come in at the expense of, well, everything else. This isn’t a problem if you have other speakers picking up the slack, but by itself, the Home Mini just isn’t mighty enough.
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