Best smart speakers of 2019: Reviews and buying advice

You needn’t live in a smart home to benefit from a smart speaker. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and other digital assistants can help you in dozens of ways, and you don’t have to lift a finger to summon them—just speak their names. If you already know you want a smart speaker, scroll down for our top recommendations. 

But consider your decision carefully. In a perfect world, these devices would be interoperable, so you could buy one brand because it’s better for music, another brand because it’s the best for smart home control, and a third because it’s superior for retrieving general information from the internet. That’s not how it works in the real world. Once you commit to one platform, you’ll want to stick with it.

On the upside, choosing one brand of smart speaker over another generally won’t tie you into that brand’s entire ecosystem. Buying an Amazon Echo, for instance, won’t limit you to subscribing to Amazon’s music services—you can also use it with Spotify, Pandora, SiriusXM radio, and several other services. And even if you have a smart home system from one company, you can control smart home products that would be otherwise incompatible with that system with voice commands—provided they’re compatible with your digital assistant of choice.

Updated October 18, 2019 to add our take on the all new Google Nest Mini. Google did a lot more than re-brand its smallest smart speaker. The company has improvved its sounds and added a bunch of new features, all while keeping the price tag the same. That said, the Nest Mini is still our runner-up pick in the entry-level category.

Michael Brown / IDG

That said, if you’re wedded to Google Play Music, streaming music from your account to an Amazon Echo is not perfectly seamless (the same goes for streaming music from Amazon’s services to a Google Home). And there are some major coexistence exceptions: Google is currently blocking its YouTube videos from appearing on the Echo Show and Echo Spot devices, for instance (although you can get there using a web browser on the second-generation Echo Show), and Apple’s HomePod will stream music only from Apple Music. If you plan to mix and match third-party products with your smart speaker, do the research to make sure they’ll work together.

If you want to know more about what smart speakers can do in general before you pick one, skip down to the “What can smart speakers do?” section.

Best all-around smart speaker

The best smart speakers have displays to convey visual information: Everything from song lyrics, to weather forecasts, shopping lists, videos, security camera feeds, and more. Amazon’s latest smart speaker, the Echo Show 5, strikes the perfect balance between screen size and price, with a 5.5-inch display and a price tag of just $90. If that’s still too high for your budget, the displayless Echo Dot (3rd Gen) costs just $50, but it frequently goes on sale for much less.

Runner-up 

Google got off to an uncharacteristically slow start in this space—and it recently muddied the waters by rejiggering the Nest brand’s role in its smart home strategy—but the Google Nest Hub is definitely giving Amazon a run for its money. The Google Assistant is far better when it comes to asking for general information, and Google has aggressively added support for third-party smart home products and services. This is also the best choice for folks who are deep into the Chromecast ecosystem, Google Photos, YouTube, and YouTube Music.