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A number of pop-up donut shops will appear in select locations across the United States and Canada where Google will be giving away units of the Google Home Mini. The search giant will place the donut shops in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Oklahoma City, Madison, St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto. These events, which will last for a day or two, is scheduled between the first week of October and the second week of November, with donut shops already appearing in Manhattan and San Francisco. People going to these shops have the chance to get either two donuts or one Google Home Mini. The search giant further highlights the fact that its new voice assistant device is as large as an ordinary donut but it still sports all the features found in larger voice assistant offerings of the company.
The Mountain View-based tech company unveiled the Google Home Mini during its fall hardware event and it competes with the Amazon Echo Dot. The Google Assistant is incorporated into the device, giving it the ability to answer questions and performing actions like creating reminders, making shopping lists, play music, and control appliances inside the house. The Assistant can be triggered by the user anytime just by saying “Ok Google” or “Hey Google”, which is detected by microphones equipped with far-field voice recognition technology
The Google Home Mini includes a speaker with a single 40mm driver, which is considerably less powerful than the one found in Google Home. To compensate for the weaker audio system, the device is covered with a fabric that is thin enough to allow sound to come through but durable enough to keep looking nice after a certain length of time. It supports a variety of audio formats like FLAC, WAV, Forbis, MP3, HE-AAC, and LC-AAC+, and it also comes with built-in support for Chromecast and Chromecast Audio. The Google Home Mini can connect to 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi networks and it also sports Bluetooth connectivity.The Google Home app, which is necessary to set up the voice assistant device, requires Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and higher. The device is priced at $49 and it is available in three color options, namely charcoal, chalk, and coral, although the latter color option is exclusive to the Google Store. The Google Home Mini is now available for pre-order, and it will start shipping on October 19th.
