Google's $99 Gemini Home Speaker Ends a Six-Year Drought

Google has opened pre-orders for the new Google Home Speaker, a $99.99 smart speaker that the company calls its "first audio device built for Gemini." It is Google's first new smart speaker in roughly six years — the last was the Nest Audio back in 2020 — and it ships on June 25, 2026, in four finishes: Hazel, Porcelain, and the U.S.-exclusive Jade and Berry.

The headline feature is Gemini for Home, which replaces the old command-and-control Assistant model with conversational language understanding. Instead of memorizing rigid phrases, users can speak naturally and string together multi-step requests — Google's example is "turn off all the lights except for my bedside lamp." The speaker keeps short-term context across a conversation, supports a Continued Conversation mode so you can ask follow-ups without repeating the wake word, and ships with ten new, more natural-sounding voices.

Some of the more advanced capabilities sit behind a Google Home Premium tier. That subscription unlocks Gemini Live for open-ended, free-flowing chats, Camera History Search for Nest cameras, and Home Briefs that summarize what happened around the house. On the hardware side, Google is promising "balanced 360-degree sound," and the speaker can pair with the Google TV Streamer to act as part of a spatial surround setup.

The launch is a notable bet on voice as a front end for AI assistants at a moment when most of the industry's attention is on chatbots and coding agents. Google first teased the device in October 2025 alongside the Pixel 10 line but held it back to roll Gemini out to its older speakers and iron out the bugs first. Now that the model is widely deployed across the home lineup, the new speaker becomes the flagship showcase for what Gemini can do once it is always listening in the living room — and a direct challenge to Amazon's Alexa and Apple's HomePod in the AI-speaker race.