Last Wednesday Google added two new speakers to their smart speaker line-up. The Google Home Max is a high end luxurious Google Assistant featured speaker which will be rivaling against the Apple’s Homepod which was also unveiled recently. Both the speakers will be hitting the market for sale in December.
Alongside the Home Max Google also released an affordable smart speaker known as the Home Mini which will be competing against the Amazon Echo Dot. Both these speakers have similar price points.
The Sonos is also not left behind and the company also introduced a new speaker with Alexa Virtual Assistant by Amazon built-in.
There are a couple of good smart speakers coming out this year and it might get hard to decide about which one to buy. As most of the speakers on our list have not hit the market yet, so we can not tell which one is the best, but down below we have compared the specifications of these speakers so that you can figure out which one will be the best according to your needs:
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First, let’s start with the low budget smart speakers, the Home Mini and the Echo Dot are both from well known manufacturers and has the same price tag of $49.99. The Home Mini has a 360 surround sound with 40 mm driver speaker while Echo Dot has a small 0.6 inch speaker. The Home Mini uses Far field voice recognition and has a hands free support. The Echo Dot uses 7 microphone array for voice recognition. The Home Mini is powered by a TBA chipset and on the other hand the Dot is powered by Texas Instruments DM3725. Both these devices also support multi room audio. There are no visible buttons available on the Home Mini except for a mute switch you can control the device by tapping on it while the dot has a light ring and buttons to interact.
Now let’s take a look at the mid ranged smart speakers including: Echo Spot, Echo Plus and Google Home. The Google Home and the Echo Spot cost about $129.99, the Echo Plus has a slightly higher price of $149.99 but also has a 2.5 inch woofer built-in along with a 0.8 inch tweeter. The Home has a 2 inch driver with dual 2 inch passive radiator and the Echo Spot has a 1.5 inch speaker. Both the Echo devices are powered by a TBA processor while the Google Home uses Marvell 88DE3006 chipset.
The Apple Homepod and Google Home Max are two high range devices with really powerful speakers and some extra features. The Home Max has two 4.5 inch subwoofer with two 0.7 inch tweeters and the Homepod has 7 tweeters with a 4 inch woofer. The Homepod clearly stands out with its 7 tweeters and even has a lower price than the Home Max. The Homepod is powered by Apple’s A8 chipset and the Home Max is powered by a 1.5 GHz 64 bit Quad Core Arm processor. The Home Max has the same voice recognition technology which is available in the Mini. The Home Pod Uses 6 microphone array for voice recognition.
The Apple’s Homepod will have a price tag of $350 which is far less than the Google Home Max which will cost about $400.
The Sonos also upgraded their speaker line-up by releasing the Sonos One. It does not have its own virtual assistant instead it relies on Alexa. This device was released an hour before Google launched their smart speakers. The Sonos One has a price tag of $299.
Which smart speaker you decide to buy will largely depend upon the Virtual Assistant you prefer. The Google Assistant has been improved a lot recently and if you are an Android user you might like it. Amazon uses their Alexa assistant in every of their speaker while Apple uses Siri which has been around for quite some time in iOS.
If you want a small device and does not care much about sound quality then you might wanna prefer the Google Home Mini or Echo Dot. On other hand, if you don’t wanna break your bank and also have some quality sound which is better than smartphone speakers then you must go for the mid range speakers. And if you want high quality sound with auto adjustable audio and optimal reverb feature then the Homepod or Home Max might be the way to go.
