If you’re an iPhone user and have other Apple devices in the family, just buy the HomePod Mini. Otherwise, the Google Nest Audio Audio is your best best. If you have an older Google Home device, you should also take a look at our comparison of the Nest Audio to the older Google Home to see if it’s worth upgrading. The Nest Audio, by contrast, is more of an oval or a super-sized pill. It measures 3.07 inches wide and 4.89 inches tall, dwarfing the HomePod mini. It weighs a relatively hefty 2.65 pounds, and it’s big enough that you may not be able to comfortably fit it in some places. The design is fairly muted in other regards. It comes in friendly fabric-wrapped colors like Chalk, Charcoal, Sage, Sand, and Sky so there’s nothing that will clash with your decor. The Nest Audio doesn’t have much in the way of physical controls aside from a 2-stage mic mute switch and three areas for capacitive touch controls. Having a hardware mute is a nice feature for privacy, but there isn’t any other visual interface like on the HomePod mini. You do get a set of four LED lights on the front that show up to indicate that the speaker is active though. Google also has some clever AI features built-in, allowing to Nest Audio to dynamically adjust audio for optimal performance. It benefits from having a quad-core A53 processor clocked a 1.8GHz along with a high-performance ML hardware engine. By comparison, the HomePod mini’s smaller size means that it has a smaller woofer and tweeter. It has a full-range driver and dual passive radiators for deeper bass and crisper high frequencies. There’s also a lot of clever things backed in on the software end with 360-degree sound and computational audio for real-time tuning. Despite all this, the sound from the Nest Audio is going to be more robust and room-filling, especially when it comes to bass. Nest Audio comes with Google Assistant, and it’s arguably the most capable smart voice assistant on the market. It has plenty of integrations, great language recognition, and will work with a much wider range of smart home devices. The Nest Audio also comes with dual-band Wi-Fi and works equally well with Android and iOS devices. The Nest Audio can do playback on multiple Nest devices assuming you have more than one. It can also make phone calls and even act as a home security setup with Nest Aware. Both speakers will work with all major streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Audible, Pandora, and others. The HomePod mini additional supports AirPlay 2, supporting streaming from Airplay devices and apps.
