Google has at last upgraded its original Nest speaker, which the New York Post reports arrived six years after the previous generation and effectively replaces it with a sleeker, more AI-powered design.

The new Google Home Speaker costs $100 ($99.99 at Amazon and Best Buy, $99 at Walmart, per the New York Post) and is built to run Gemini for Home, letting it control the rest of a smart home rather than act alone.

The hardware is compact: 3.4 inches tall, 4.2 inches in diameter, 0.9 pounds, with a 58mm full-range driver, 360-degree sound, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, Thread 1.3, three far-field microphones, and a 30W USB-C power adapter. It ships in Berry, Porcelain, Hazel and Jade colorways.

New York Post commerce reporter Nishka Dhawan found plenty to like.

Setup through the Google Home app took her less than five minutes, and she called Gemini the difference-maker: the speaker can set schedules, read out a calendar, hold full conversations — she even asked it how to set up a new laptop — and accept interruptions mid-sentence.

She also liked that it can check on a Nest doorbell or camera and trigger routines like brewing a compatible coffee maker at 6 a.m., though some smart features require a Google Home Premium subscription, with the Advanced plan adding camera history search and a Home Brief recap.

The catch is audio: the 360-degree sound gets surprisingly loud with clear bass and vocals, but she says it sometimes feels flat and less dynamic, and placement matters — it sounded notably better beside her media console than on a cluttered desk.

The same day the reviews landed, ZDNET senior contributing editor Ed Bott published the counter-story: he moved his entire smart home off Google Home in a single weekend using the open-source Home Assistant software from the nonprofit Open Home Foundation, running on hardware costing under $200, and replaced "OK Google" with "Hey Siri."

He says the migration itself took only 10 minutes, and the HomeKit Bridge component — about 30 seconds to install, linked through his Apple TV 4K as a hub — exposed every HomeKit-incompatible device, including Deako switches and Hunter-Douglas shades, to Apple Home with no subscription fee.

His motivation was partly privacy: he questioned why summoning a corporation was needed to dim lights, and where all that voice activity gets recorded.

Notably, he judged Apple's newly announced HomeView a competent manager for Apple loyalists but said the "ultimate dashboard" title belongs to Home Assistant.

Taken together, the two pieces sketch a fork in the road for smart home fans.

The New York Post's verdict positions the new speaker as the easy path — a worthwhile $100 upgrade, especially for anyone already invested in Google's ecosystem, with Gemini making it feel far more useful than prior generations, though music-first buyers may want more power.

ZDNET's account is the escape hatch: Home Assistant's compatibility matrix rivals Google's and Amazon's, supports custom dashboards and multi-action automations, runs on iOS, iPadOS, Android and any web browser, and can even be extended to a fully local voice assistant with no cloud at all — a project Bott says he is saving for another weekend.

The surprise is that Google's biggest speaker launch in six years debuts just as a technically minded user shows the whole platform can be swapped out in one afternoon.