Google Home Smart Speaker Review

We offer our experiences and Google Home Smart Speaker Review here. Now this unit Launched in November of 2016, the Google Home smart speaker is a Wi-Fi enabled model, that acts as the front end for Google’s virtual assistant service. The Home can “hear” your spoken questions and commands, and can speak the answers back to and perform tasks for you. It’s also an internet radio that can play hundreds of internet radio stations from TuneIn, Pandora, iHeart radio, Etc. Plus, this speaker can play podcasts, play games, and tell you the weather. Thus here, we offer our Google Home Smart Speaker review, that explores these and many other speaker functions.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Introduction

Smart speaker devices like the Google Home also give you access to a virtually unlimited music selection via your YouTube Red, Pandora Premium, Spotify Premium, and Google Play subscription accounts. You may also ask for local traffic reports, and customize a list of national and local audio news sources, and then ask Google Home to play them for you in playlist fashion. Not a bad compliment of capabilities for the $130 price tag.

Control of popular televisions and smart home devices like the Nest internet thermostats and Philips Hue light bulbs is a snap with the Google Assistant via the Google Home Smart Speaker. Program modules, called abilities, are constantly being developed that extend the speaker’s capabilities. The speaker also supports voice-managed shopping lists.

Priced under one hundred thirty dollars, the Google Home Smart Speaker is a reasonably affordable smart assistant, radio, music player, shopping clerk, sales woman, and news curator.

Picture of the Google Home intelligent speaker, completely unboxed, showing the original packaging opened, the speaker, manuals, and power adapter. — Google Home smart speaker, completely unboxed, showing the original packaging opened, the speaker, manuals, and power adapter.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Benefits, Pros, Features, and Advantages

Small size

Small foot print and lightweight. At less than a pound and shorter than a 16-Oz. can of soda pop, the Google Home packs a lot of function into a modestly sized form factor. And, with the cloud-based infrastructure Google Assistant support, size these days is certainly no indication of just how capable a device might be.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Includes 16.5-volt, 2-Amp Power Adapter

While Google Home smart speaker needs more power than a USB-style adapter is capable of delivering, the included 16.5-volt, 2-Amp, positive center barrel connector, switching power pack is not much bigger in size and weight than a universal USB adapter. USB power adapters just cannot supply the necessary power in order for this speaker to provide the rich bass and volume that qualifies this device as a high fidelity music player.

Picture of the Google Home Smart Speaker, bottom view, showing the 16.5 Volt DC barrel style power connection. — Google Home smart speaker, bottom view, showing the 16.5 Volt DC barrel style power connection.

Bright Multi-Color Top Lights

This bank of LED lamps that form a circle beneath the top touch surface of the speaker, light up when you issue Google Home questions and commands. They indicate status of internet connection, and processing activity, and are dark and invisible unless the speaker is fulfilling a command or answering a question.

Picture of the unit booting in progress, displaying the multi colored light ring, indicating that. — The unit booting in progress, displaying the multi colored light ring, indicating that.

Touch Surface on Top for Touch Control

You can tap the top of the speaker, where the lights are located in the previous picture, to pause and resume audio play. You can also swipe your finger in a circular motion anywhere on the top to adjust the volume. Note in the next picture, that you can’t see the top lights at all on the speaker when they’re dark.

Picture of the Google Home smart speaker, front view, with box open. — Google Home smart speaker, front view, with box open.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Multiple Case Colors Available

Currently the Google Home comes in numerous cloth or metal speaker grill colors, including orange, blue, purple, gray, black, rust, and white.

Picture of the various speaker grill colors available for the Google Home Smart Speaker. — Google Home smart speaker, example of available grill colors.

Mic Off Button

Disable the built-in microphone array by pressing the Mic Off button, found on the back. Doing so mutes the mic so that this Google Home smart speaker stops listening. The light ring glows a stead orange four-blip pattern while the mic is off, to remind you that the speaker assistant is not available to respond to questions until you enable the mic by again pressing that Mic Off button.

Rear view of the speaker, showing the Mic Mute button (near top) and pilot lamp hole (near bottom, above the G logo).

Far field microphones

The speaker includes microphones that incorporate far field communication technology and natural language processing, which provides much improved voice intelligibility over more traditional mics. The assistant rarely misunderstands commands.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Fast Google Assistant Response

She generally answers a question in a few seconds or less, although times may increase with heavy internet or Google server traffic.

Can Act as a Bluetooth Speaker

As of this writing, you can indeed pair your Google Home with an external Bluetooth speaker. Plus, the Google Home itself is ALSO a Bluetooth speaker.

Accessible and Blind Friendly

Primary setup and control functions are accessed via the Google Home app, which you install on an iOS or Android tablet computer.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Lots of Online Help

Google offers extensive help files that explain how to set up and operate this device in detail. Check here to view it.

Answers Many Questions

Ask the assistant for the current time, weather, news, and traffic reports as well as to sing Happy Birthday, tell you a joke, or engage in rudimentary conversations with her. We expect this capability to improve as artificial intelligence and machine learning are further integrated into the Google Home infrastructure.

Alarm Clock and Timer

The smart speaker can act as a very smart alarm clock and kitchen timer, and supports multiple wake-up time settings and timers.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Uber Support

Abilities to request rides from Uber are available. No Lyft support yet however.

Teach your Google Home to Recognize Voice

Further, like the Amazon Alexa assistant, we found the Voice Match feature that lets Google Home learn how you speak. This feature asks you to speak its work word variations. Then, the Google Home smart speaker knows how you speak those phrases. As such Google better understands your unique speech patterns. This helps reduce false wake ups.

Getting Smarter Every Day

Lots of new and free abilities have been developed already with many more in the works.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Cloud Enabled

This smart assistant is cloud-based, and therefore benefits from Google’s massive computer farms, networks, and software engineers who constantly update, enhance, and extend Google Assistant functions.

Works with your Google Account

The Google assistant, with help from the Google Home app, can link to various subscription services in your Google account, such as Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube Red.

Plays Many Internet Radio Stations

Google Home offers access to the thousands of Internet broadcast streams from TuneIn radio, when they work.

Supports Many Content Providers

Plays podcasts, hourly news broadcasts, the audio portion of YouTube videos.

Growing List of Abilities

News briefings and music services are just a couple of the many abilities that Google Home has.

Smart Home Enabled

Through this voice service, Google Home can control popular smart home devices such as Nest, Philips Hue (the multi-color capable Wi-Fi light bulbs), power switches, and wall outlets.

Room Filling Sound in Small Package

Though not much larger than a 1970s portable radio, the Google speaker offers louder, higher fidelity sound. It provides ample volume for bedrooms, living rooms, and even larger rooms.

Can Act as a Wi-Fi Hotspot

Allows in-range mobile phones and tablets to connect to and use your Google speaker, without giving them your home Wi-Fi password.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Chromecast Support

In lieu of Bluetooth, you can control your Chromecast devices with this Google speaker. You can direct said devices to play movies and music with just voice commands, with this speaker as your intermediary.

Whole-House Audio Support

Multiple Google speakers can function as a group. The system supports syncing of two or more speakers spread throughout your home, so that they play the same thing together for multi-room music playback. You hear the same thing at the same time from all grouped speakers.

Easy to Buy

Get it from popular vendors such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Problems, Cons, Limitations, and Disadvantages

Few External Speaker Options

The Google speaker offers neither a 3.5mm stereo line-level output jack (that would support connection to a hi-fi audio stereo system) nor a Bluetooth connection for pairing with numerous external Bluetooth speakers. So you cannot add smart speaker functionality to just any set of amplified speakers without a Chromecast receiver, sold separately.

Abilities Need More Development

Some abilities currently offer sketchy documentation on how to utilize all of their capabilities. Some offer scant features that do not fully represent the smart devices they’re supposed to be designed to control. However, we predict that this inadequacy will fade as a prominent issue as the technology grows up.

Google Home App Sometimes Slow and Buggy

As with all tablet apps, program crashes are not unheard of in the Google Home app. And since this app relies on the speed and quality of the supporting internet connection, it can at times run slowly and take a long time to respond to menu and button taps.

No Programmable Wake Words

To get Google Home’s attention, you choose from two possible phrases (Okay Google and Hey Google). We’d prefer instead, a customizable wake command that could be ANYTHING we can say; not just a couple phrases. Multiple wake commands would also be a plus.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Limited Voice Training Feedback

Google maintains a history list of the questions and commands you’ve recently issued. You may opt away from by the way. Plus, they say that the assistant does indeed learn how to better understand you from these recordings.

However, no method we could find allows you to provide feedback for the questions you asked. But we feel that you should be able to provide detailed feedback about whether Google Home properly understood each question and then provided the correct answers. This would help the system and its developers learn the “correct” responses to various queries.

No Battery Power

Unlike the Amazon Tap, with no internal battery, you must plug the Google speaker into external power for it to function.

False Awakening

Sometimes, the Home speaker will think that you’re talking to her when you’re playing a radio or talking to someone on the phone. But this is of little consern though. If this is a problem though, be sure to disable the buying services like booking a cab, so that she doesn’t buy something that you do not want.

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: Does Not Work Without Internet Connection

Google Home must be able to access Google services in order to work correctly.

Needs More Internet Radio Services Needed

Currently, the Google speaker only offers direct access to TuneIn and iHeart radio stations. So we’d like to see them add services like OOTunes, StreamTheWorld, CBS, and other large scale streaming services.

Many TuneIn Radio stations do not Play

The Google Assistant is finicky about how you have to request some TuneIn stations to play. For instance, saying “Okay Google, play WRTA” does not work, even though WRTA radio is a working TuneIn stream. She responds with, “I looked for WRTA on TuneIn, but it is either unavailable, or can’t be played right now.” However, saying “Okay Google, play 1240 Altoona,” plays the correct station. Further, many stations appear to have no alternative way of requesting them. For those, the speaker says, “Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that yet.”

Google Home Smart Speaker Review: No Access to Amazon Music

We have Amazon music accounts where we’ve uploaded some of our music library. But we cannot yet play those recordings on Google Home. This may never come to be, since Amazon and Google are direct competitors in the smart assistant speaker space currently. But one can only hope, and hopefully, this hoping will yield some results.

Does not Remember more than the Last WiFi Network

Unlike the Amazon echo devices, which store a history of Wi-Fi networks that you’ve accessed with your Echo device, the Google Home Smart Speaker only remembers one network. This means that if you take your speaker out of your home to another network, set it up there, and then subsequently bring it back to your own network, you must again explicitly scan for and choose your Wi-Fi network and enter its password again. What a pain. Hopefully, Google will catch up with Amazon and add a Wi-Fi network connection history feature to this speaker.

Our Rating for this Google Home Smart Speaker Review

We find the original Google Home virtual voice assistant to be a reasonably good value. It’s advanced, true, but still very “green,” and has much room for further growing and development. As new content sources come online, the assistant will likely offer them.

Over all, we appreciate the workmanship and thoughtful engineering that went into this product so far (particularly its wide excursion speakers and acoustic design), and so, rate it at 88 out of 100. It will deserve a much higher rating if Google implements some of those want-to-have features discussed above.