Four years after the introduction of Google Home smart speaker, Google showed its successor to the company's mid-range smart speaker. In line with the company's broader rebranding of smart home products, the device is now called Nest Audio. The smart speaker will retail for $ 99 and will be available in a variety of colors including sage, sand, sky, chalk, and charcoal.
The device is available starting October 5 and will go on sale in 21 countries.
The company says it prioritized more bass, added volume, and clearer sound when designing the product that replaces the old Google Home smart speaker. In fact, Google claims Nest Audio has 50% "bass" and can get 75% louder than Google Home. It all comes in a much larger package. It sports a 19mm tweeter to hit the high frequencies while a 75mm midwoofer pushes things into the low end. We'll have to take them at their word until we can get our hands on the device ourselves.
Nest Audio's design ditches the candle-like form factor of the previous generation, instead embracing the fabric blob design that the Google Home Mini and Google Home Max have long sported.
The smart speaker market is in a bit of a strange place, devices have undergone several iterations but ecosystems for devices have, if anything, contracted as third-party integrations with smart assistants largely failed to overcome. basic activities like listening to music. For Google, the market opportunity now feels more like creating a low-cost alternative to Sonos, a company that is suing Google for intellectual property theft. Multi-room audio has become increasingly accessible over the years, and smart speaker manufacturers have been largely responsible for it.
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