Best Buy has
Google Nest Audio Smart Speaker (Charcoal or Chalk) on sale for
$49.99.
Shipping is free.
Thanks to community member
Aaronch for finding this deal.
Available:Best Buy via eBay has
Google Nest Audio Smart Speaker (Charcoal or Chalk) on sale for
$49.99.
Shipping is free.
Available:Features:- Nest Audio adapts to your environment and whatever you're listening to, so music sounds better.
- Nest Audio comes with privacy built in. You can delete your Assistant history by saying, "Hey Google, delete what I just said." Or to turn off the mic, just use the switch on the back.
- Nest Audio works together with your other Nest speakers and displays, Chromecast-enabled devices or compatible speakers.
- You can say things like, "Hey Google, what's the weather this weekend?", or ask the news or sports scores. Hear your schedule, set timers and alarms and even turn on the lights or turn up the heat (compatible smart lights or smart thermostat required, sold separately)
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Top Comments
"Okay, playing the YouTube channel Mark Rober on workshop display"
"No, google play it on this speaker"
"Tris Speaker played center field for Boston and Cleveland in the early 1900s"
"Nevermind"
"Ok, glad to help!"
27 Comments
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Can you expand on this?
I still use these around the house for turning on/off and adjusting groups of lights, asking about the weather, setting alarms, playing music, and finding my phone when it's misplaced. They still work like day 1 for me.
I would agree they've gotten dumb. Frequently the completely miss commands; or misinterpret commands. Same hardware I've always had so must be something in the software.
Casting to a group is nice, I have them in adjacent rooms and it sounds great.
I keep expecting Google to release new ones, or for these to fall below $50 when they regularly go on sale, but neither has happened yet...
Agreed!
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They might be talking about the lawsuit brought about by Sonos which forced Google to disable a bunch of features that Sonos supposedly had exclusive rights to.
This included controlling the volume of multiple speakers with one command, as well as creating speaker groups for whole house audio.
Maybe they're unaware of this, but it's important to note that this court ruling got reversed and Google was able to restore all previous functionality to its speakers (including 1st Gen Google Mini).
The only caveats are that you need a (fairly) recent device that can run the latest Google Home app and you may need to power cycle the speakers to kick off any firmware updates.
Have you trained a voice model through Google Assistant on your phone?
If not, it's a given that they won't respond correctly.
They're meant to pick up individual voices and tailor personal responses to that voice model, but it also affects accuracy.
If you need proof, just change the default language of your Google account to a different English speaking region and see how it picks up vernacular it otherwise wouldn't when using US English.
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"Okay, playing the YouTube channel Mark Rober on workshop display"
"No, google play it on this speaker"
"Tris Speaker played center field for Boston and Cleveland in the early 1900s"
"Nevermind"
"Ok, glad to help!"
Gemini has feature parity to Google Assistant.
This is one of the first things Google addressed when they introduced Gemini.
The problem isn't the assistant model, it's the fact that the hardware has very limited memory, an outdated processor, and most people's networks aren't tailored for low latency streaming of information.
The latter can at least be somewhat addressed by using Google's DNS servers as well as tuning your router for VoIP adjacent tasks, but what we really need is for Google to release beefier hardware and/or allow people to self host a local copy of Gemini. Self hosting would have the added benefit of not requiring the internet to do menial tasks.
"Okay, playing the YouTube channel Mark Rober on workshop display"
"No, google play it on this speaker"
"Tris Speaker played center field for Boston and Cleveland in the early 1900s"
"Nevermind"
"Ok, glad to help!"
Sounds like you need to retrain (or likely, train) your voice model.
None of these smart speakers are meant to be used in guest mode.
Also, if you have an iPhone, your experience in the Google ecosystem is always going to be worse because it has barely any of your voice data to train on.
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Part of the incentive is listening to you in order to tailor advertisements.
There have been third party sound bars with Google Home integration, but the issue has always been that Google has limited control over the firmware for these devices, so even basic casting ability can be hit or miss.
I've seen some projects where people have essentially gutted a Mini and wired the speaker output to a better speaker or even an amplifier, but it gets tricky if you're trying to run it inline with an HDMI source. You'd need an HDCP compliant HDMI 2-IN to 1-OUT splitter and an analog to HDMI audio converter to complete the system.
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