Updated at October 9, 2020:
Google has officially launched the Nest Audio smart speaker in India. The price of Nest Audio is set for Rs 7,999, but the company is initially offering the smart speaker at a discounted price tag of Rs 6,999.
The Nest Audio smart speaker will be available exclusively through Flipkart for the first few weeks of launch. But, eventually, head out to other retail outlets across India including Reliance Digital and Tata Cliq. The smart speaker will go on sale in India starting October 16.
Our original story from Monday, October 26, 2020, follows:
As we’re spending more hours at home and one thing we love to do is to listen to music. It doesn’t matter what we are doing at home, like cooking, reading, and having food, the music just plays in the background. To accompany our music listening craze, Google along with Chromecast with Google TV has launched its newest smart speaker – Nest Audio made for music lovers.
An update to the original Google Home (not the Google Home Mini or Nest Mini), the Nest Audio brings upgraded internals along with a sleek new look. As always it packs the Google Assistant and all the intelligent voice assistant perks along with it.
Google Nest Audio has been priced at $99.99 (roughly Rs 7300) in the US. The company has not yet revealed the Indian pricing but confirmed the smart speaker will be launching here in the coming weeks. It will be available exclusively via Flipkart and at other offline retailers across India like Reliance Digital and Croma.
The smart speaker for music lovers
Nest Audio features custom-designed quality drivers and housed in a slim profile which is made out of 70 per cent recycled plastic. The grill, fabric and materials are optimized to bring out audio in its natural form without distortion. You get to choose between two colour choices – Chalk and Charcoal. Under the hood, the smart speakers boast a 75mm mid-woofer that brings a stronger bass and a 19 mm tweeter that offers consistent high-frequency coverage and clear vocals. It’s actually can offer, 75 per cent louder and 50 per cent stronger bass than the original Google Home. It also features a powerful 1.8 GHz Quad-Core A53 processor coupled with high-performance ML hardware engine (with up to one TeraOPS of processing power).
In addition to the hardware backing, Google has spent over 500 hours tuning the Nest Audio for a balanced low, 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 company has minimised the use of compressors to preserve dynamic range in music, which in-turn allows quiet parts in the music to be delicate and subtle, and the loud to be more dramatic and powerful.
The Media EQ feature in Nest Audio can automatically tune itself to whatever content you’re listening to – like music, podcasts, audiobooks or even a response from Google Assistant. The Ambient IQ can intelligent adjust the volume of Google Assistant, news, podcasts and audiobooks based on the background noise.
Thanks to the dedicated machine learning chip we told earlier, the Google Nest Audio supports on-device processing. It can learn and respondents to your commands two times faster than the original Google Home. With Google Assistant at its core, it can do numerous task using it like getting information, playing music or podcasts and control compatible smart home devices.
Other hardware parts in Nest Audio include three far-field microphones that can listen to your command across the room. It also has a two-stage mic mute switch for achieving hardware mute aka full privacy. It also features capacity touch controls with three touch areas. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n/ac (2.4 GHz/5 GHz), Bluetooth 5.0 and built-in Chromecast support. It takes power using a 30 W, 24 V external power adapter.