Would You Buy a $400 Smart Speaker from Google?

One afternoon in April, Google designers and engineers convened at a garage-like industrial design lab in Mountain View, California, and cranked up the tunes. It was a coming-out party for the Google Home Max, a smart speaker that went on sale this week. As the 30 or 40 revelers mingled, they took a moment to congratulate themselves; a single Max speaker was filling the cavernous space with the stylings of rapper Kendrick Lamar.

The Home Max is a traditional speaker design—it resembles the Sonos Play 5 model—and wouldn’t look out of place in a media room. The sound quality is impressive. So is its ability to pick up a user’s voice even when the volume is cranked to 90 percent of capacity. The gadget is part of a “living room” strategy to get consumers to use Google Assistant, Play music, YouTube and Chromecast—and not Apple and Amazon products and services.