Looking for the best smart speaker? We round up the top voice assistant-enabled music players you can buy.
The best smart speakers of 2021 are some of the most multi-functional devices you can own. Here’s why: they help us to control our smart home devices, play music, and come with voice assistants ready to answer our most mundane, obvious or confusing questions. These AI virtual assistants you control with your voice, which include Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, have taken many homes by storm. That’s because there’s a lot they can do: play music, tell you about the weather, read out the news and control your smart home devices hands-free (like your Philips Hue bulbs or smart locks), these are just a few of the many things they can help you with. But it seems that many of us are under-utilizing our smart speakers and choosing to access voice assistants via our smartphones. This is why you need to choose the right smart speaker for you in order to get the most out of these clever gadgets. The most well-known smart speakers include the Amazon Echo and Google Nest (which used to be called the Google Home) ranges of products – and more devices are being added all the time, including the new Amazon Echo (2020), Google Nest Audio, and Apple HomePod mini. There are plenty of third-party speakers too, like the Sonos One. These might not be made by Amazon or Google, but they come with both Alexa and Google Assistant built-in. If you need help finding your next virtual assistant, take a look at our guide below. We’ve selected the best-sounding smart speakers for a range of styles, budgets and smart home ecosystems. This should make choosing the right model for you a breeze. And, if you’re keener on a speaker with a screen, check out our dedicated guide to the best smart displays instead. [Update: The Sonos Roam could be the best portable speaker on the planet, with a powerful sound, rugged design, excellent connectivity features, and smart home control. However, we can’t wholeheartedly recommend it at this stage, after our review unit stopped working halfway through our tests. We’ll be updating our review once we’ve established whether this was an isolated incident.] Sonos’ debut smart speaker is a cleanly-designed, feature-rich and great-sounding device that brings together the best of both the Alexa and Google Assistant ecosystem – plus, Sonos’ own multi-room smarts and mostly unrivaled sound performance. There’s also a new feature in the mix that promises to change the game: AirPlay 2. With it, the Sonos One can talk to Siri and form a multi-room pairing with the Apple HomePod. If you feel a bit tied down by the Sonos One, be sure to check out its portable cousin, the Sonos Move; this nifty speaker comes with all the smarts of the One, and is top of our list of the best Bluetooth speakers for 2021 (though the new Sonos Roam could well take its spot if it lives up to its lofty specs). Read more: Sonos One review [Update: Sonos could be on the verge of releasing its first-ever wireless headphones. According to a report from Bloomberg, the headphones will likely have multiple virtual assistants that would function similarly to the company’s Sonos Arc and Sonos One speakers, and would focus on competing with Sony, Apple, Bose and Sennheiser by offering high-end audio performance.] The latest spherical Amazon Echo is a complete revamp of the company’s flagship smart speaker, and the aesthetic overhaul, while impressive, is just the half of it: with improved audio, a built-in Zigbee smart home hub, and a new AZ1 neural edge processor that will reduce the time it takes for Alexa to respond to commands, it’s a complete makeover. Of course, while the hardware is all new, it’s still the same ol’ Alexa under the hood. Alexa will still be able to answer your basic questions or make calls within your country of residence, as well as control any number of smart devices you have around your home. So are there any negatives? Not many, really. The Echo’s only real issues are that its max volume level is a bit soft, especially compared to larger smart speakers like the Apple HomePod and Google Home Max, and that Amazon remains a rather insular company, limiting the technology that’s compatible with its speakers. That means you won’t be able to Cast audio to the Echo the way you can with the new Google Nest Audio, and you’ll have to use Bluetooth any time you want to connect to your phone. Read more: Amazon Echo (2020) review The Apple HomePod finally entered the smart speaker battle for your bookshelf in early 2018, and it’s still making waves in 2021. The obvious benefit of an Apple HomePod over an Echo or Google Home device is that it’ll play nice with your other Apple products. So if you’re a die-hard Apple fan the HomePod may be a no-brainer. But it’s worth asking the same question you should always be asking yourself when you want to splurge on a new Apple product: how much of a premium should you pay for owning a device that fits only seamlessly into the Apple ecosystem? When we reviewed the device we were torn because we were really reviewing two things at once: how the HomePod weighs up as a premium speaker and how it fares as a smart home hub.
