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This afternoon, Google made the official announcement that the Google Home Max is now available for purchase both from the Google Store and participating retailers like Best Buy, Verizon and Walmart. Not surprisingly, Amazon isn’t on this list and likely won’t be anytime soon.
Still, the fact that most of us can now head over to a retailer and hopefully get some hands-on time with Google’s plus-sized smart speaker is pretty exciting. While we were at the event in San Francisco back in October I wasn’t able to actually give it a real listen as our time that day was pretty much devoted to the Pixelbook.
So, let’s recap what Google is doing with the biggest speaker in its lineup.
Room-Sensing Tech
Straight from Google:
Google Home Max sounds pretty amazing right out of the box because it’s our first speaker with Smart Sound. Powered by Google’s artificial intelligence (AI), Smart Sound means Max can automatically adapt itself based on where it’s placed in the room. There’s no extra setup or testing required. Even if you move Max from one spot to another, it’ll continuously tune itself to the room, so your music will sound one step closer to the studio.
Again, I’ve not used this in the wild, so I can’t comment on how well it actually works. I can say the promise of what it is attempting to do sounds amazing and if it delivers on this promise, the Google Home Max will be in a league all its own.
The rest of the features are quite similar to other Google Homes, so we won’t go on too much about all that. It has far-field mics for picking up your voice across the room, supports Google’s Chromecast Audio for linking to other speakers, has a premium set of speakers for fantastic audio, and can do all the tricks Google Assistant is growing quite capable of.
If you are looking for what amounts to a functional control center and quick access to Google’s Assistant, the standard Google Home will probably do just fine.
If you are looking for all that and a premium sound source for your home or office, the Google Home Max might be worth a look. We have a review unit on the way and will dig in when we get our hands on it and can actually test the thing out.
Until then, are you considering this latest piece of Google hardware? Enjoy some fantastic videos and decide for yourself!
https://youtu.be/UiBhshQ0FQA
https://youtu.be/2_pE3f4lJio
