I just received the free Nest Mini from Google for being a YouTube Premium subscriber and I’m quite impressed. The sound is impressively loud for such a small device and doesn’t sound bad at all. It recognises my commands from several feet away at least while music is playing.
Now I have this set up on my office area, I want another one for my living room. Damn you Google…
Can you compare it to any other speaker you’ve heard? What about other smart speakers, like HomePod? I’m an Apple boy, but I got myself the Nest Mini offer and waiting to receive it now 
I don’t have any other smart speakers to compare with and only have some cheap computer speakers which don’t come close to the Google speaker for quality. I’m impressed, and it’s free 
i don’r know if the larger Google Nest Home sounds any better, but I don’t think it would compare to a muli-hundred dollar speaker.
One issue I had was that it kept falling off the 5Ghz network (speaker is right in front of router) so have put it on 2.4Ghz.
The big boy Google Home Max (or whatever they rebranded it to) sounds much better than the smaller ones… but it’s much larger and more expensive, so that makes sense. It can also be hardwired using some USB-C to ethernet adapters, which was my reason for replacing my smaller original Home’s (the ones that look like air fresheners or whatever) with the big boys. Ironically, the deal when I bought the bigger ones was to get two minis (of the original generation) so I have a bunch of them unused sitting in a box. (I gifted some of them.) I was using a mini in the kitchen but I replaced it with one with a display, so the clock and timers are visible at a glance.