I tested the Google Home Speaker against the HomePod Mini, and only one is truly smart

I use both the Google Home and Apple Home ecosystems, and that means I’ve used my fair share of smart speakers and displays. I’ve let the Nest Mini, Nest Hub Max, HomePod Mini, and HomePod 2 all power my home — and now it’s the Google Home Speaker’s turn. Google’s new smart speaker retails for $99, matching the price of Apple’s HomePod Mini. So, I put both orb-shaped speakers in my living room for a week, testing their chops as speakers and digital assistants.

It’s easy to forget that the HomePod Mini is nearly six years old. Given the smart speaker’s age, I expected the Home Speaker to handily beat it. That didn’t prove to be the case. The Home Speaker is certainly smarter, but the HomePod Mini sounded better. That said, if you need a smart speaker to handle smart home control, casual music playback, and everything in between, there’s only one option I recommend.

Google’s Home Speaker is louder, but HomePod Mini is sharper

If you’ve owned a Google Home or Nest speaker in the past, there’s something you need to understand about the Home Speaker right off the bat. Although it costs the same as the Nest Audio once did, it’s a completely different product. The Home Speaker is about half the size, uses a single driver, and places greater emphasis on the “smart” part of being a smart speaker. This isn’t a Nest Audio successor, it’s a HomePod Mini alternative.

Starting with the specs, the Google Home Speaker uses a 58mm full-range driver with omnidirectional sound. Apple doesn’t advertise the size of the HomePod Mini’s full-range driver, but it’s said to be about 50mm. That passes the eye test, as the Home Speaker is slightly bigger than the HomePod Mini. Both speakers can fit on any desk, table, or shelf, as they’re tiny. The 360-degree sound means you don’t have to stress too much about speaker placement.

The similar footprint made me think these speakers would sound similar, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I used Apple Music to stream songs through both speakers, controlling them using my voice and their companion apps. The Google Home Speaker’s volume immediately impressed me. I listened to songs at 10% or 20% volume, and it filled my mid-sized living room. If I cranked it up near three-quarters or max volume, the sound permeated my entire one-bedroom apartment.

The HomePod Mini’s sound profile was completely different. I needed to raise the volume to 50% or 75% for a comfortable listening experience, but even then, it wasn’t enough. I’d go as far as to say that the HomePod Mini works fine on a desk, but you need a stereo pair to adequately fill a room.

That doubles the setup cost, and the Home Speaker can also be used as a stereo pair. So, if you have the budget to spend $200 on a pair of smart speakers, you could buy two Google speakers and get a louder, fuller sound than a HomePod Mini stereo pair can deliver.

The catch is that I’ll take the HomePod Mini’s sound signature over the Home Speaker’s dynamics, any day. Neither speaker has the driver size required to deliver incredible low-end, and the Home Speaker, especially, produced muddy kick drum beats. Where the HomePod Mini separated itself from the Home Speaker was in the middle and high areas of the soundstage. Vocals, snare drums, and cymbals all sounded crisper and more defined through the HomePod Mini, whereas the Home Speaker sounded tinny.

That tinny sound only got worse as the Home Speaker’s volume increased, and beyond 80%, it crossed into uncomfortable levels of distortion. It’s worth emphasizing that the Home Speaker can be twice as loud as the HomePod Mini. The question is whether you care about room-filling sound or precise detail. This is a $99 smart speaker, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience for this kind of speaker prefers the former.

You can set two HomePod Mini speakers as the default stereo output for the Apple TV 4K, and you can do the same using two Home Speakers with the Google TV Streamer. In either case, you’ll get a low-latency connection and spatial audio support. I only got one Home Speaker review unit and couldn’t test this firsthand, but I’d expect a stereo pair to seamlessly connect to the TV Streamer and provide soundbar-like audio quality.

Gemini is a smarter assistant than Siri — and it’s not close

The Home Speaker is Google’s first smart home speaker built for Gemini, and it shows. Meanwhile, the HomePod Mini uses the same Siri that it debuted with half a decade ago. That isn’t a compliment, and Apple hasn’t confirmed if HomePod speakers will ever get upgraded to the new Siri AI.

Both speakers rely heavily on the cloud, but the HomePod Mini has the old Apple S5 chip found in the Apple Watch Series 5, which isn’t getting Siri AI. The Home Speaker has a quad-core A55 2.0GHz processor and a neural processing unit (NPU), presumably making it better for on-device processing. Testing both side-by-side with identical questions and requests, the Home Speaker is clearly better.

There were a few occasions when the Home Speaker and HomePod Mini returned similar responses to basic questions, such as how grass-fed beef differs from grain-fed beef. More often than not, the HomePod Mini defaulted to web results that I had to pull out my iPhone to view. I asked each speaker to explain the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning, and HomePod Mini couldn’t do it. The Home Speaker recited the answer clearly and concisely.

It’s true that the Gemini takes a few seconds to reply through the Home Speaker or control your home, but the lag never felt untenable. I’d say a command like, “Set the air conditioning to 75 degrees” and carry on with whatever I was doing — the A/C kicked on within 10 seconds. I have Google Nest cameras, and I was able to ask the Home Speaker exactly when a package was delivered. It replied with the delivery time and the company that dropped it off, which is incredibly useful.

I found that the Home Speaker is smarter than the HomePod Mini by a long shot, but it’s not as smart as Google claims. I asked both speakers to create a new to-do list and add multiple tasks to it, all in a single command. The Home Speaker did it, while the HomePod Mini said it couldn’t. Later, my partner tried to use the Home Speaker to add another task to the list, but called it a “checklist” instead of a “to-do list.” That time, it failed.

I thought Gemini was supposed to help the Home Speaker understand conversational commands like these, which aren’t always worded perfectly. This failure shows Gemini for Home and the Home Speaker still have some work to do.

Google’s speaker shines within the Home ecosystem

I gave the Home Speaker and HomePod Mini access to all the same tools. I paired the Home Speaker with a Nest Cam Indoor and the HomePod Mini with a HomeKit Secure Video camera. When the HomePod Mini failed to answer the same questions about my camera history, it was solely because Siri isn’t as smart or robust as Gemini. Something similar happened with audio playback. My A/V receiver supports both Google Cast and AirPlay 2, but only the Home Speaker could stream music through my sound system upon request.

This is really an indictment of Apple Home and Siri, which I don’t think Apple has paid enough attention to over the years. Google is working on AI and Home more than ever — that’s true regardless of your stance on the Google Assistant to Gemini transition.

If you want the “smart” in smart speaker and plan to buy into an ecosystem, the Google Home Speaker is undoubtedly the better purchase. Apple’s HomePod Mini is for those who want the “speaker” in a smart speaker, and care less about the intelligent features.