Google Nest Audio smart speaker with new features launched: Here is what it costs

Google on Wednesday night launched its new smart speaker – the Nest Audio – along with the new Pixel smartphones and Chromecast with Google TV. The new smart speaker is an upgrade to the original Google Home and is likely to arrive in India soon. The Google Nest Audio comes with several new features and claims to offer a better music listening experience. It features a slimmer design and is made of 70 percent recycled plastic. 

The Google Nest Audio has been priced at $99.99 (around Rs 7,400) in the US. There is no official word about the India pricing yet but you can expect the speaker to be positioned in the sub Rs 10,000 segment. 

The good news for interested customers is that India is amongst the first wave of countries where the product will be available – a strategy we haven’t seen with too many Google products recently. Google Nest Audio will go on sale in the US, Canada, and India starting October 5, and 21 more countries from October 15.  

In India, it will be available via Flipkart and other retail outlets, the company revealed on its India blog post. 

The speaker has been announced in Chalk, Charcoal, Sage, Sand, and Sky colour variants. The new Nest Audio speaker is said to be 75 percent louder and produce 50 percent stronger bass than the original Google Home. It uses a 75mm woofer, a 19mm tweeter, 3 far-field microphones, a 2-stage mic mute switch, a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor.  

The speaker comes with touch controls and has Chromecast built-in for streaming. Other features include stream transfer from one Home or Nest speaker to another, and multi-room control. 

At the same event, Google also launched the Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5 smartphones -- both of which are unlikely to be launched in India. However, it has confirmed that Pixel 4a will be available in the country starting October 17.