Google Home Speaker launches with Gemini-powered smart-home features

Google’s Home Speaker went on sale June 25 for $99.99, putting the company’s first audio device built for Gemini for Home into homes after preorders opened June 17. The launch turns Google’s October 2025 hardware promise into a real test of whether a smart speaker can still justify itself in houses already crowded with phones, TVs and other connected devices.

Google says the speaker is built around Gemini for Home, which is meant to handle more natural, multi-step conversations than Google Assistant and control smart-home devices in a more conversational way. The speaker includes 10 new natural-sounding voices, and Google says it can be paired with Google TV Streamer for a home-theater setup. That makes the device less of a novelty speaker than a control point for the broader Google Home system.

The tradeoff is that Google is asking households to commit. Its help pages say that once a home switches to Gemini for Home, it cannot switch back to Google Assistant. Basic features remain free, including smart-home controls, media playback, alarms, timers, calendars, notes, lists, reminders and general questions. More advanced tools, including Gemini Live and search of camera livestreams and history, require Google Home Premium.

That split matters because the speaker’s main advantage is supposed to be convenience. A household will not buy it to stream music alone, since the market already has cheaper options for that. Google is betting that hands-free control of lights, doorbells, timers and routines, plus a more capable conversational assistant, is enough to pull the speaker out of the category of nice-to-have hardware and into something families actually use every day.

The speaker also arrives as part of a wider Google Home refresh. Google’s October 2025 announcement introduced new Nest Cam Indoor, Nest Cam Outdoor and Nest Doorbell hardware built around Gemini, and the camera lineup was pitched with 2K HDR video. Together, the products show Google trying to make Gemini the operating layer for the home, not just another voice assistant on a shelf.