Best smart speaker under 4000 - Mi Smart Speaker With Google Assistant

As of my knowledge smart speakers are not exactly the product category that people like to invest a lot into, because we are just not sure if we are going to use it that much. The effect of that is that most people end up buying the smaller Echo Dots and Google Home Minis because the bigger speakers cost around Rs.7-8K, and these just give you most of the functionality that you need with a smart speaker. But because of their size, they do not deliver the best quality in music. So Xiaomi has launched their Mi Smart Speaker that tries to solve this issue. It’s not a small speaker like Echo Dot, so it does sound way better, but it’s also not as expensive as the full sized Google Home or Amazon Echo. It also has some other unique features, so let’s check them out and see if you should buy it or not. 

Detailed Overview

The Mi Smart speaker does look pretty premium, even ignoring its price tag. This speaker has 10531 holes on the metal grill that surrounds it, and that does look really good. It also looks really clean on top, because you have 4 stealthily placed touch sensitive buttons on it, along with its 2 far field microphones. It also has an outer ring that illuminates with different colors like the echo speakers. It also has some weight to it at 853 grams, that does make it feel high quality. The buttons on top work really well, so you have volume up and down buttons, then a button to mute the microphone for privacy, and then you have a play/pause button and the great thing about these buttons is that they never miss your touch and they are very responsive, so the playback button just instantly plays and resumes audio which makes it feel very high quality. 

The smarts inside this smart speaker are provided by Google with their Google Assistant, and even though I also like ALEXA on echo dot, I do prefer Google Assistant because it syncs really well with my Android smartphone. So for example if you set reminders you get that added on your Google calendar, if I turn the lights on or off it shows the brightness slider on my phone, and most importantly, Google Assistant is just smarter and much more natural to interact with than other Smart assistants. You are getting a 1 year subscription of Gaana with this speaker, but it also supports YouTube music, which basically has everything that you can think of, so that really adds to its value if you have YouTube Premium.

I am not going to cover Google Home Smart Speaker features in details, but you can do a lot of things like currency conversions, translations, flip coins, controlling smart home devices, controlling other Google devices like your Android TV, you can basically do a google search on it with voice and get that result on your phone which is awesome. Google Home also supports Hindi now, so you can also talk to it in Hindi. The speaker also has Bluetooth support, so you can put this phone besides your bed, then you can connect your phone to it and watch videos with audio from your phone, and you can also have your smart TV connected and use it as a TV speaker, because it is really good enough for that purpose. You can also get two of these speakers and connect them to get a stereo channel sound, and you are really going to get a decent volume out of two of these speakers.

Mi says that they have a good quality sound chip from Texas Instruments and it is tuned by DTS which does actually make it sound quite balanced, but one thing I do miss on this speaker is lack of a 3.5mm out at back, which could have let the buyers take advantage of the good quality sound chip with their other speakers. On the Mi Smart speaker we have a front firing 12W speaker and 63.5mm driver, that is decently big for a device like this. I also prefer the front firing speaker instead of the 360° one, because I mostly need sound projected in one direction where I am listening to it, so it does that with its full power. 

 Device Specifications

The new Echo Dot 4th Generation does have its speaker on front, but its sound quality is not as good. Even though the smaller speaker can actually get louder, its sound is not as complete as the Mi Smart speaker, and the songs sound shouty on it as it lacks bass to match that volume. 

Final Verdict

The Mi Smart speaker has a very balanced sound with very good presence in bass, which it retains even at full volume, and that sounds really great, and it is good enough to be actually enjoyable for music, so I really like this speaker a lot, because now you do not have to spend Rs.7-8K to get a smart speaker that sounds good enough for music. It also of course sounds way better than the Google Home Mini, so I didn’t compare it with that. So in conclusion, at the launch price of Rs.3500 the Mi Smart speaker is a really great deal. Not only it sounds really good at this price, it also manages to look really premium, while also functioning really well.

The only ‘CON’ I think of it is a lack of a 3.5mm jack, but in practice, I do not think I would keep another bigger speaker powered on all the time and attach that to it, and you can always connect to bigger speakers with Bluetooth. So this speaker really delivers a value for money that made Xiaomi popular. So I can really give this Smart Speaker a very strong recommendation.

The above verdict is the sole opinion of Trending Gadgets INDIA.

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