Despite the long gap, I don’t think a Gemini speaker that modern Google releases in 2025 is too different from the 2019 Nest Mini (2nd-gen) or 2020 Nest Audio.
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To Google, a smart speaker delivers answers, controls your smart home, and plays music/audio. The company is done with wanting a third-party app and game ecosystem on the form factor. In the case of the Nest Mini, affordability ($50~) is the fourth tentpole.
What’s needed to deliver that experience are good microphones and speakers, while the cheap processor needed to power it has only gotten more powerful in the intervening years. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth round things out, with there’s maybe a Thread radio if the component is inexpensive.
Meanwhile, the design of the Nest Mini, which dates back to 2017, is iconic enough and feels sufficiently Google-y. Since “Google Assistant” remains, there’s no need to redesign the four dots, though I’d have liked to see something more vibrant as Siri’s circular pattern is quite nice on HomePods. The capacitive touch controls (play/pause + volume) and microphone switch are fine.
With the Nest Audio, a higher price point allows for more hardware. What people want from the 2020 model is the ability to use it as a “home theater sound system.” Presumably, the reason Google never launched it was due to performance. Would a beefier processor help?
Ultrawide band (UWB) for Tap to Cast and a Thread radio here seems likely, while I’d love if it had a temperature sensor that appears in the Google Home app and could be leveraged by Nest Thermostats. The 2nd-gen Nest Hub never used this for anything but sleep tracking, unlike Apple’s HomePod Mini. The other interesting sensor would be Soli for motion, proximity, and presence, like on the Thermostats, as well as gesture controls.
The loaf of bread design is on the bland side and not particularly iconic, but provides room-filling audio that’s meaningfully louder than a phone and/or laptop speaker.
From a hardware perspective, nothing I included is particularly novel. Google’s existing experience with Soli and temperature sensors make integrating easier. I wouldn’t be surprised if speakers with that combination of hardware already exist in the lab, especially since we saw evidence of new models in 2023 that were later canceled and seemingly a new effort in 2024.
To me, the question of why they were canceled (or delayed) comes down to whether it delivered a meaningfully better experience than the existing offering. As seen with the nearly nine year gap between the 3rd and 4th-gen Nest Learning Thermostat, Google has a penchant for waiting.
If new Nest speaker hardware can deliver a meaningfully better Gemini experience, that’s grounds for releasing. But on paper, I don’t think there’s any advancement that delivers that. Voice commands that require an LLM-level response will still be sent and processed in the cloud. (However, I do wonder whether on-device speech-to-text would deliver any latency improvements. At the very least, that might be interesting for local smart home commands.)
The Gemini-powered Assistant is already being tested on the Nest Audio and 2nd-gen Mini, with the experience being pretty straightforward.
That’s great for existing owners, while Google gets to benefit from cheaper manufacturing costs and they get to bide their time and work towards something that’s meaningfully better.
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