The launch of the new Google Home smart speaker earlier this week means the end of the road for a pair of legacy models getting a little long in the tooth. Google has confirmed the Nest Home Mini and Nest Audio have been discontinued and will no longer be available for sale.
The reasoning, it appears, is quite simple. The company doesn’t want to be offering any products that get in the way of its Gemini Artificial Intelligence Skynet-ing the bejesus out of the entire planet.
Thankfully, for owners of those six-plus-year-old speakers (aside: remember when buying a speaker was a once in two-decades event?) Google will continue to support both the Nest Home Mini and Nest Audio speakers.
In a statement to Engadget, the company says: “Existing Nest Mini and Nest Audio devices will continue to be fully supported with regular software updates, security patches and customer care.”
Cannot say fairer than that. Especially considering these were speakers Google billed as being suitable to have in multiple different places around the house. They were cheap, but if you’re having to replace loads of them that’d soon add up.
As for the successor, as you’d expect, it was build specifically for Gemini. It possesses the conversational AI that’ll battle the Amazon Echo range with Alexa+ for supremacy in the smart speaker realm.
It’s also a Matter hub, making it easy to control all of your smart home devices through voice or the Nest app. Interestingly, it’ll offer an audio description of what your Nest camera has just seen if you’re unable to access the live feed in that moment.
The new Google Home speaker costs $100/£100 and is available to pre-order now with orders shipping on June 25.
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