Google has announced Nest Smart Speaker at its LaunchNightIn event alongside Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G smartphones and new Chromecast with Android TV. Google Nest Audio is priced at US$ 99.99 (Rs 7358 approx.) and it comes in Sage, Sand, Sky, Chalk, Charcoal colour options.
It will go on sale in the U.S., Canada and other countries including India starting from October 5 and 21 more countries from October 15. Google has confirmed that it will be available in India this month on Flipkart and at other retail outlets in October. Google says that Nest Audio will be available in India in two colours: Chalk and Charcoal.
Google Nest is an update to the original Google Home, and comes with a list of acoustic upgrades for a better music listening experience, apart from a slimmer profile. It brings forward some of the Assistant features the Nest Mini introduced last year, and it has the same sustainable fabric design using 70 percent recycled plastic.
The Nest Audio is powered by a quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz. Nest Audio is 75 percent louder and has 50 percent stronger bass than the original Google Home. It comes with a 19mm tweeter for consistent high Frequency coverage and clear vocals and a 75mm mid-woofer.
Google says it has completed more than 500 hours of tuning to ensure balanced lows, mids and highs. The bass is significant and the vocals have depth, which makes Nest Audio sound great across genres: classical, R&B, pop and more. The custom-designed tweeter allows each musical detail to come through, and the company has optimized the grill, fabric and materials so that you can enjoy the audio without distortion.
The Media EQ feature enables Nest Audio to automatically tune itself to whatever a user is listening to. And Ambient IQ lets Nest Audio also adjust the volume of Assistant, news, podcasts and audiobooks based on the background noise.
Other features include stream transfer through which one can move music from one device to the other with a simple voice command and multi-room control which allows you to dynamically group multiple cast-enabled Nest devices in real time.