Ten months later, the $100 Google Home speaker is available to order

Good things take time, but not everything that takes time is good. The jury is still out on the Google Home Speaker, but it took a while to arrive. After announcing a new speaker last August, Google finally has a release date. The company’s first smart home speaker in years will launch on June 25, and you can preorder today for $99.99.

The popular Google Home Speaker is Google’s first home device in nearly six years. The last one was Nest Audiowhich started in September 2020. This new device is small and round-the-round, technically. It’s covered in a slightly modified fabric that’s available in four colors: hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (jade and berry are only available in the US). Google says so the device produces “360-degree sound” so that you have a uniform listening experience everywhere in the room.

Google has turned it on again.

Credit: Google

Previous Google speakers have included LED lights like the Assistant, but the Google Home Speaker has a light ring on the bottom that lights up when the device is listening, “thinking,” or responding. This is becoming a trend with Google. The company will be looking for a similar bright color scheme for the upcoming releases Googlebook laptops. There are three remote microphones distributed around the speaker that can speak your voice, and there is a mute switch when you don’t want it to hear the “OK Google” trigger.

Inside, the speaker is powered by a quad-core A55 processor clocked at 2GHz with a dedicated NPU. It runs the local AI models for better isolation, allowing it to filter out background noise better than previous smart speakers. Smart speakers have a tendency to be annoying, so the Google Home Speaker can be annoying in that way. If you don’t want to talk to the speaker, there is a capacitive touch control on the top to control TV playback.