Where to buy
Both the Nest Mini and Echo Dot have a retail price of £49.99.
The Nest Mini is available from Google, Currys, Argos, and John Lewis. You can also still buy the older Home Mini, often for less, from Currys PC World, Argos, John Lewis, and AO.com.
Design & Build
Both these mini smart speakers feature a small puck-like design, and are covered in soft fabric. The Echo Dot is now more rounded than previously (now in its third generation), but Google Nest Mini is certainly the more pebble-like of the two.
There are controls on top of each device, though for the Echo Dot these are in the shape of clearly defined buttons while the Nest Mini has a touch-sensitive surface.
On the Nest Mini you can control volume by tapping either side of the device (or by asking Google Assistant to adjust the volume), and four LEDs shine bright from below the fabric cover to let you know Google Assistant is listening, with another two on the sides to highlight the volume controls.
Echo Dot has a light ring on its top that performs this same function, and from certain angles is easier to see than the Home Mini’s LEDs.
An obvious difference between the two is found in the ports and connections. Both must be mains-powered using custom DC cables (though the original Home Mini had a handy Micro-USB port) but the Echo Dot has the advantage of an AUX port, which is missing from the Google Nest Mini. This allows you to hook it up to a separate speaker for improved sound quality using an audio cable. This is also possible with the Google Nest Mini, but only using Bluetooth (which, incidentally, is also supported on the Echo Dot).
Audio quality
You’ll be surprised by how loud is the sound from such tiny devices, and it also sounds good at these low prices.
Both Dot and Mini can perform better when paired with additional Dots and Minis. Both are able to form a stereo pair and support multi-room audio – multi-room audio blasts out the same mono signal across multiple speakers, while in a stereo pair you get a slightly different sound from each.
You are able to adjust the treble and bass on both devices.
Alexa vs Google Assistant
In our opinion, what’s more important than the pricing, design, ports and connections and even sound quality is what each device can do. After all, these are not ordinary cheap Bluetooth speakers, but smart speakers with intelligent voice assistants at their core.
In our opinion, Google Assistant is the better of the two. It supports more natural conversation (and now continued conversation without you having to say “Okay Google” each time), while Alexa needs you to structure your questions much more carefully.
Google Assistant also shows more personality than Alexa, though both are able to tell jokes and play games. (We’ve compiled lists of some funny things you can ask Google Assistant and Alexa.)
And with so many Google web services to tie into there is a huge amount of data that can be drawn upon when asking it to tell you about your day ahead or set calendar appointments and reminders.
On each you can also set up routines, whereby you say a single phrase and they action various commands. These can include things like playing music, but also controlling smart home kit – and this is the key area in which Echo has the lead.
For the Echo much of this integration is made possible through add-on ‘Skills’ (in essence developer-created apps), and its huge popularity means the Skills store is brimming with new features you can add – not all of them related to smart home products. We’re in two minds about this: many are very gimmicky, and some are useful. But we don’t like the idea of needing to add a Skill to get some of these features.
You can use IFTTT with both devices, but this is more useful on the Home Mini where there isn’t any ‘app store’ of skills to enable as with Alexa. Some of the time you can control devices directly with no set up but otherwise it’s something you’ll have to set up yourself using IFTTT, which can be a bit of a hassle.
Verdict
On sound quality the Nest Mini has a slight advantage, though the Echo Dot adds support for stereo pairs as well as a physical AUX port. On price there’s nothing in it, but while Alexa takes the lead on Skills (allowing it to integrate with other smart-home kit, for example), in terms of brains and personality Google Assistant is out of Alexa’s league.
Marie is Editorial Director at Foundry. A Journalism graduate from the London College of Printing, she’s worked in tech media for more than 17 years, managing our EMEA and LatAm editorial teams and leading on content strategy through Foundry’s transition from print, to digital, to online - and beyond.
