In 2016, Google showed off its first smart speaker, the Google Home ($99 at Walmart). A year later, its puck-size sibling the Google Home Mini ($39 at Walmart) arrived. Small but mighty, this speaker came with all the smarts of Google Home but at an affordable $49. 

With Google and Nest back under the same roof, the second generation of the Google Home Mini is called the Google Nest Mini. At first glance, it looks just like its predecessor, but a handful of new features make the still-$49 (£49, AU$79) Nest Mini an even better value.

Design

The Nest Mini looks very similar to the Google Home Mini, and that's on purpose. Google didn't seem keen to fix what wasn't broken, and you'll get a nearly identical aesthetic placing the Nest Mini around your home. There are four colors, swapping the Home Mini's teal, which was called aqua, for a darker, gray-blue shade called sky. The coral, charcoal and chalk colors still remain.

On the outside of the speaker, you'll find the same muting switch as before. However, there's now a DC power jack instead of the Micro-USB that powered the Home Mini, so don't assume your old Home Mini power cords will work interchangeably with the Nest Mini. 

The team at Google spent hours testing the audio transparency of dozens of fabrics to create a more eco-friendly cover for the Nest Mini. The speaker's top fabric is made from 100% recycled plastic, and the external enclosure is made from 35% recycled plastic. Google told me that one half-liter plastic bottle makes enough fabric to cover a little bit more than two speakers. That's a small design detail that could tip the scales for an environmentally conscious consumer trying to decide between the Nest Mini and an Echo Dot ($68 at Walmart). 

You'll also get a wall mount on the back of this new smart speaker, something Google said was inspired by all the different ways users are placing, mounting and attaching smart speakers to surfaces in their homes. Ironically, the company that's created the perfect way to mount your smart speaker as a wall clock isn't the company with a clock display on its smart speaker. That title goes to Amazon and the new Echo Dot with Clock. 

Features

While the Nest Mini looks nearly identical to the Google Home Mini, there are plenty of updates inside. 

The Google Home Mini has two microphones for recognizing your voice across the room. The Nest Mini has three to improve that far-field detection. In my testing, the third mic did increase the range at which the assistant could hear me, and it did particularly well at hearing me over music playing from other speakers nearby. Of course, a lot of that will depend on your home's acoustics and layout. 

The microphones are also making use of a new feature Google calls ultrasound sensing. The speaker emits tiny inaudible chirps, which bounce off objects in the environment, reflect back to the microphones and tell the device if someone is near. This is turned on when music is playing, but you can opt out of it if you like in the Home app. There's also the option to call your home speakers from the Home app if your mobile device has Google Duo installed. 

With ultrasound sensing enabled, two LEDs will illuminate when you hover your hand over the Nest Mini to show you where the volume adjustment touch points are on each side of the speaker. That's a thoughtful add given that I've always had trouble finding the touch controls on the Google Home Mini. Touch controls for playing and pausing music are on top.

The Google team also redesigned the speaker inside the Nest Mini, making it larger and just a bit heavier with more space around the components to create a fuller bass sound.

Inside the Nest Mini is a machine learning chip with up to one TeraOPS of processing power. This chip helps the speaker learn which commands are commonly repeated so it can respond to them without needing the cloud at all. Let's say you turn on your kitchen lights or ask to play a specific song every day of the week at the same time. The Nest Mini learns those actions, stores that data locally and processes those commands without sending any information to Google's servers. 

This is part of Google's push toward what the company calls "ambient computing," the idea that your Google-powered smart home can begin to anticipate your needs. Ambient computing reduces how often you need to talk to your smart speaker to get information, making your assistant a more behind-the-scenes, seamless part of your home. 

Audio performance

One of my favorite updates to the Nest Mini is ambient IQ. When you're listening to news, podcasts or other audio streaming where people are talking (it doesn't work with music), the Nest Mini can adjust for ambient noise in the background, like an exhaust fan in the kitchen.