With the Point atop the ten-foot tall island in the living room, it pretty much refused to accept voice commands unless we performed a chin-up and spoke to it without the cabinet in the way. It seems to have a hard time coping with hearing around physical obstructions, though.įor the most part, the speaker in our Nest Point worked as you'd expect-we set timers, asked it to tell us jokes, and other normal things. It's loud without being overpowering, sounds decent without really wowing you (think "that cheap jam box you had in college and liked okay"), and it listens well and accurately from significant distance. The smart speaker functionality isn't in the Nest Router, though-only in the Nest Points. If you own a Google Home smart speaker, the Assistant in Nest Wi-Fi is going to seem very familiar-in everything from overall sound to listening ability to some occasional bugginess.
We don't feel there's much to say about it that hasn't already been said about the other Google Home Assistant products, though. Google does still sell three-piece kits, as well as individual Points and Routers that can be added into existing networks, and we hope to update and retest with an additional Nest Point soon.Īlthough Nest Wi-Fi isn't just Google Wi-Fi with a smart speaker, the Assistant is a big piece of Google's sales pitch for the new kit. The original Google Wi-Fi really needed at least three nodes to adequately cover the test house, but Nest Wi-Fi managed it credibly with two. (Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.) Granted, a lot of that new CPU power and RAM is really there to power the Google Assistant-but also it comes in handy for general network use.
Each of the original Google Wi-Fi nodes was also an AC1200 2×2 access point, but Nest Wi-Fi points are updated with a newer and better wireless chipset, with additional RAM and a CPU nearly twice as fast as the original's. The Nest Router is a 4×4 AC2200 access point and router, and the Nest Point is a 2×2 AC1200 access point.
It wasn't clear from the launch announcements, but Nest Wi-Fi really is more than just Google Wi-Fi plus a smart speaker. The good news is, a two-piece Google Wi-Fi system did cover even my challenging 3,500-square-foot house-an impressive achievement and a clear win over the original Google Wi-Fi. And heaven help you once you get into turn-of-the-century chicken-wire-and-daub walls, or apartments with central elevator shafts, and so forth. If you set up Wi-Fi systems in many houses, you'll also soon discover that even without an occluded sub-basement floor, a house shaped like one long Viking hall is very different from a house with similar volume but arranged in a mostly rectangular or L-shape.
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