Google Confirms New Home Speaker for Next Week, With a $100 Price and Four Colors

Google has spent the better part of a year keeping people guessing about its next smart speaker, and the company finally tipped its hand. An email from Anish Kattukaran, Chief Product Officer of Google Home & Nest, landed in inboxes this week with a thank-you note about Gemini for home and customer feedback. The line that matters comes at the end: "those of you who have been patiently waiting for a certain speaker... keep a very close eye on your inbox next week."

That is about as direct as a pre-launch confirmation gets without an actual product page. The device in question is the Google Home Speaker, first teased back in October with a vague Spring 2026 release window. Spring is nearly over, so the timing makes sense.

What's new

The headline change is the shape. The old Nest Mini was a flat puck, the kind of thing you set on a shelf and forgot about. The new Home Speaker drops that form entirely for a rounded, upright body that looks a lot like a squished Apple HomePod mini. That is not just a styling choice. A taller enclosure gives the drivers more internal volume to work with, which usually translates to fuller low end than a puck can physically produce.

Google is leaning into the audio angle. Two of these speakers can be paired with a Google TV Streamer for a stereo or surround setup, putting the speaker in the same multi-room and home-theater conversation as Amazon's Echo and Apple's HomePod lineups. Pairing two small speakers for stereo is not new, but bundling it with Google's streaming box points at a living-room pitch rather than a kitchen-counter one.

Color options expand to four: Berry, Hazel, Jade, and Porcelain. The leaked Best Buy Canada listing only surfaced Hazel and Porcelain, so the brighter Berry and Jade finishes may launch later or in limited regions. That listing originally showed a June 25 release date before being switched to "Coming soon," which lines up with the email's next-week teaser. The likely sequence is an announcement between June 15 and June 22, with sales opening June 25.

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How it compares

Price is where this gets interesting. The Home Speaker is set at $100. That slots it directly against the Apple HomePod mini, which carries a $99 list price, and above Amazon's standard Echo, which floats around $50 to $100 depending on the generation and any given week's pricing. Against Google's own back catalog, it is a clear step up from the $49 Nest Mini, so buyers are paying for the larger cabinet, the stereo pairing, and presumably better acoustics rather than a like-for-like replacement.

The HomePod mini comparison is the one to watch. Apple's speaker sounds good for its size but locks you into the Apple ecosystem, with Siri handling voice. Google's bet is that Gemini for home, which Kattukaran's email specifically highlighted, gives its speaker a smarter assistant than either Siri or Alexa currently offer. If the Gemini integration delivers more natural follow-up questions and better contextual answers, that becomes the real differentiator at this price, more than raw speaker specs.

What Google has not confirmed yet is the part that actually decides whether $100 is fair: driver count, wattage, microphone array, and whether there is any onboard processing for the Gemini features or whether everything routes to the cloud. Those numbers are missing from every leak so far, and they are what a buyer needs to judge the speaker against a HomePod mini that already has a known and respectable acoustic track record.

Who it's for

If you already run a Google or Nest household and have been holding off on adding speakers, this is the obvious upgrade path, especially if you own or plan to buy a Google TV Streamer and want stereo sound under the TV. The multi-speaker pairing makes the strongest case for people building out a whole-home audio setup on Google's platform.

If you are speaker-agnostic and mostly care about sound quality per dollar, hold judgment until the full specs and early reviews arrive. At $100 the Home Speaker is priced like a premium compact speaker, not a budget assistant puck, and it needs to justify that with measurable audio performance and a Gemini experience that feels genuinely ahead of Alexa and Siri. We will know far more once the official announcement drops, which by Google's own admission is days away. For the full rundown as details land, 9to5Google has been tracking the listings and email leaks closely.