The smart speaker war is back and this time there are three serious players fighting for a spot on your kitchen bench.
Google’s new Google Home Speaker just landed in Australia for AU$199, and it’s the company’s first new smart speaker in six years. Not a refresh. Not a minor update. Six full years of nothing, and then suddenly, a new hardware. At the same time, Amazon has been pushing a redesigned Echo lineup built around Alexa+, its AI-upgraded voice assistant. And hovering on the horizon is OpenAI’s Jony Ive-designed hockey puck speaker, reportedly priced at over $300 USD and slated to arrive sometime in 2027.
Three different visions of what a smart speaker should be in 2026 and none of them quite agree.
Google’s pitch is simple: the old Nest speakers ran Google Assistant, and the new Google Home Speaker runs Gemini. According to Google’s AU blog, it’s built around 360-degree audio, a light ring that pulses when Gemini is listening or thinking, and a quad-core processor with dedicated AI processing on-device. It’s available at JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman, comes in Hazel and Porcelain locally, and includes a six-month Google Home Premium trial, after which you’re looking at AU$15 a month if you want the full Gemini Live experience.
Amazon’s new Echo Dot Max, meanwhile, launched at US$99.99 and is built around the company’s AZ3 chip, according to CNET. Amazon’s angle is Omnisense, a sensor fusion platform that combines audio, ultrasound, and Wi-Fi radar so Alexa can theoretically be more contextually aware of what’s happening in your home, rather than just waiting to be asked. The Echo Studio at US$219 goes further with spatial audio and the more powerful AZ3 Pro chip.
Then there’s OpenAI. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that its debut consumer device is a doughnut-shaped, screenless speaker designed by Jony Ive’s LoveFrom studio, packing a camera that watches your environment and feeds it into ChatGPT. It has moving parts that animate to signal when it’s responding. It’s priced above $300 USD. It’s not out yet.
We reviewed the Google Nest Hub back in 2019 which came with a smart display and that retailed for A$199 when it was released. The new Home Speaker is interesting but the AU$199 price tag might be a hinder to some. That’s double the US$99.99 price, and the catch is that the useful features (Gemini Live, Home Briefs, Camera History Search) are all locked behind a subscription that kicks in after six months. So you’re not really buying a AU$199 speaker. You’re buying a AU$199 speaker plus a AU$15/month habit.
Amazon is in a similar spot. Alexa+ is rolling out and both companies are essentially building hardware to sell you an AI subscription. Which is fine, but let’s call it what it is.
OpenAI’s hockey puck is a different story entirely. It’s not trying to be a smart speaker. It’s trying to be a new kind of ambient AI companion. Whether that’s brilliant or deeply unsettling (a camera that permanently watches your living room, anyone?) depends entirely on your comfort level. I’m curious, but I’m not convinced the market for a $300+ ChatGPT orb with googly eyes is as big as OpenAI thinks.
The Google Home Speaker is already here. You can walk into JB Hi-Fi today and buy one. Amazon’s new Echo lineup has limited AU availability so far. And OpenAI’s device won’t land until 2027 at the earliest, so AU pricing is anyone’s guess but given how the Google AU premium worked out ($99 USD becoming $199 AUD), I wouldn’t expect it to be cheap.
The real battle isn’t hardware but it’s whose AI assistant you want living in your home. All three are betting that the answer in 2027 will be different from 2024. The smart speaker war is worth paying attention to again.
