it's been nothing short of exciting fun and interesting living with the Google
Nest hub Max for the last few days but I'm ready to give you my full review on
the Nest Hub Max and tell you whether or not it is the smart display we've all been
waiting for
hello Automators thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from Automate Your Life
and today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation by
ensuring you're spending your money in all the right places now we're going
through our official review of the Google Nest Hub Max and I can promise
you that this is truthful because it is not all a bed of roses and the reason
I'm kind of telling you this up front is because lots of these features that I'm
going to talk about today have something I really liked about them and something
I disliked about them and so you're going to want to stay all the way to the
end to kind of see that differential here between what the features are good
for and what they're not the Google Nest Hub Max is a Google Assistant enabled
smart display so that means it has the Google Assistant on board now utilizing
that Google Assistant is a ten inch smart display a Nest camera a full-on Nest
camera here and a full stereo system actually in the back of this device it
is capable of Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5.0 and Thread communication or connectivity
options as well
what it does is no short list and that's because it does have the Google
Assistant on board and that means that it gets access to all the standard
things that you see with smart speakers music video and even TV now from
subscription services like YouTube TV you have the ability to get recipes get
general information stocks weather all of those basic capabilities you can
essentially ask this device anything in terms of productivity options you have
things like your calendar to manage you have lists and even the custom list
feature is working very well on this device on top of that you have the
ability to make phone calls as well as even receive Google Duo and make Google
Duo Video Calls on this device as well Hey look at me up here oh yeah it's all
of you and I can switch so I'm just like tapping I can switch and then I can end
call oh and I can turn off the tracking okay no no back on okay and then I can
mute you you but this is also chromecast built and so that means you can cast to
this device and with it having the Google Assistant on board you can ask it
to cast to other devices as well with that same chromecast feature so that
makes it very powerful in terms of video capabilities the Nest camera on board
here or the camera in general gives us a whole new dimension to a smart display
now we've had cameras in the past but there's a big difference between that
and putting a Nest camera on here and what it starts to give us access to is facial
recognition features which instantly personalizes this device more to what
you want to see so it provides personalized results when using voice
match but it also provides personalized information just by looking at the
device things like your commute or you get personalized recommendations for
music video news and even events in your area so there's some real
personalization going on as a result of that camera now it also expands to
something called gestures those gestures allow you to go ahead and start/stop
music with just the use of your hand now I'll talk a little bit more about that
in the likes but you can control music you can end alarms or timers that are
going off and you can also stop interactions with the Google Assistant
so if you've accidentally triggered it then you can go ahead put up your hand
and it will just stop the interaction right there of course with it being a
Google Assistant enabled device it can control your smart home and it acts as a
reasonably good smart home controller now I'll talk about some of the details
here but this is the first Thread certified smart display that I have seen
from Google from Nest and from all of their partners there with Thread the
digital photo frame capability or what we call ambient mode here on this device
is gorgeous it is a Bluetooth speaker and it can also control another speaker
as a Bluetooth speaker now there's more details but let's go on to what I really
enjoyed about the Google Nest Hub Max
don't cops run red lights well some do but not your dad
in your universe there's only one spot
there's another you let's get the easy stuff out of the way it is beautiful and
I was not sure if I was going to like the form factor basically just grown
larger here when we went from the Nest Hub to the Nest Hub Max I really wasn't
sure about that but it looks fantastic and I think it looks much better than
this device now that I see the larger one on top of that the screen is
absolutely fantastic it it is definitely my favorite smart display screen that
I've seen thus far and it seems to make videos look very very crisp from almost
any source as well as the photos when I put on ambient mode I'm really liking
the look and feel of my photo so everything just looks fantastic on the
device one more thing about the screen here the touch control and the interface
is sharper and I think it's really the right size for this kind of an interface
and the way that Google has provided all these new controls I think the new size
of the display is really important in that regard the speakers are nothing
short of incredible and when I compare it to the Google Home Max it's actually
better and the reason I say that is not because the Google Home Max can't blow
you away with incredible sound it can but the clarity on the Nest Hub Max is
unparalleled there's nothing else I have in my home except the Homepod and a
sonos speaker that is on the level of clarity of this device and when you turn
it down really low one of the things that I always look for is how much of
that sound do I still have or do I lose the low end or do I lose the upper end
it is incredibly well balanced now don't get me wrong this speaker is quite loud
and it can fill almost any space that I've seen I took it out to my garage
which is the largest space I have in my home and it absolutely pushed me out of
the room I had to turn it down so it can be very very powerful the Google
Assistant is a little bit better in terms of the experience that you have
with this I found it more accurate in when I when I kind of say the same
command to all of these devices and I let them all here I'm seeing a little
more accuracy over here and I think that based on the two far-field microphones
that seem able to hear a lot better than these products over here I think Google
has really improved that somehow and 10 to 15 feet away with this thing blaring
at 80% or over and I'm speaking just at my regular voice and it's hearing the
wake word so that's pretty impressive capability from that regard the other
performance improvement here on the Google Assistant is really when the the
speed of the results the processor here seems much more capable of handling
everything that's going on and that makes sense with a brand new device the
facial recognition features are a delight and I didn't know going in that
they would be this good but 10 to 15 feet away this device instantly
recognizes me and then starts it brings up my little icon for my account and
then it starts to personalize the recommendations to me it gives me a
little good morning and then it says here's your commute and it does all that
before I'm even really up to the interface so you can kind of see all of
that information right away one of the new cool features here from Google and
that's face recognition and so just as I enter into the space you can see the
little icon pop up there that indicates it knows it's me I can also hide my face
and then it will kind of switch over to a base look and other people as they
come up it will actually switch to them so there's a real power here in terms of
a multi-user experience and this is a lot of what I've seen out of people here
on the channel asking about they want to know how does this person get their
specific recommendations and voice match was good at that at some level but a
face match is a whole nother level and really when you think about how this is
gonna work throughout the world this is going to work a lot better so I'm really
excited to see this capability go forward and it's already very good
another thing about the nest camera is the Google Duo video calls and this Nest
camera has a real capability edge over things like the Lenovo Smart Display and
I say that because the quality is extremely high on the video that you're
transmitting but also because it actually moves and follows you it tracks
you as you move around the room or wherever you are and it's very smooth
very accurate and very good at what it does simply putting up your hand will
actually stop this timer from alarming our same thing with alarms so you can
see the little indication right there
you can see it stopped it again so if you've accidentally woken this up
or you've decided that you don't need it then you can just do that and we'll stop
and this leads me to talk about gestures now gestures is basically you put up
your hand and it will take an action now I told you it'll start and stop music
and it will stop alarms and timers once they're at the end and you can also stop
the interactions and it is very reliable when you know how to use it but that is
all it can do like you can't say go to the next song it doesn't do that yet so
again this is something that I think over time we'll see Google adjust and
give us additional gesture options the nest camera simply put being on board is
also a big benefit to a lot of people it is a full security camera and can be set
up as any other nest camera is currently now these are all of my likes and I
think I want to move on now to some of the things I didn't like so much about
the Nest Hub Max one nice feature is when you turn on the camera you'll
actually see a green light now this is standard on nest cameras now and when
you actually go into it and you're viewing it or anyone is you will find
that the green light blinks softly
and that Nest camera is a jointed experience now if you're setting
up the device you will find that number one you set up the nest hub max you get
a camera on it and it does the facial recognition but then you have to set up
the Nest camera separately and this is still done through the nest app rate now
although it does cause you account migration so that's another problem for
those of you who have a Nest account you want to maintain that as soon as you set
up that Nest camera you have to migrate your account so you don't have to set it
up right now and that's my honest recommendation to people who want to
maintain their Nest account but that means you're not using one of the
capabilities on the device the other disjointed component is facial
recognition works when you've set up the Google Nest Hub Max but then if you were
to set up the Nest camera like I have it has a familiar face as component to it
and those are two separate things so I was walking into the room and I would
get a notification on my nest application that it didn't recognize me
because I hadn't set that up and over on the Nest Hub Max you could see it
instantly responding and recognizing me as a person so it's disjointed in a few
ways and even the management of all the settings for that cameras is in the nest
app so there's a number of inconsistencies that you've got to get
used to and then they will shift over time as we know Google and Nest get
closer and closer together now we talked about gestures and facial recognition
and how good they were they are very reliable when you're
looking at the device so I'm looking at the camera right now and if I was to
head over at about 40 50 degrees here as an angle off to Center then what would
happen is my face recognition would still work but it would not work with
gestures and so gestures kind of has to be something that you're dead on and
that lighting is is relatively good in at night it's definitely not working you
don't need great lighting but at night my gestures are not working simply
because it's not seeing me it's not recognizing that now that is something
that I think they could correct over time but it's
there right now and then that angular component I get why they struggle with
it but gestures just does not work if you're not within that kind of forty to
fifty degrees of center and then facial recognition you can get up to about 70
degrees out and it will still work a little aside the ultrasonic capabilities
or the ultrasonic sensing I really haven't seen it I don't know what's
what's going on I've come in in the evenings when it's really dark haven't
seen it really react so I don't think that's working right now but maybe
somebody can tell me different in the comments if they've seen something
working the Thread hub which was a major component for me is nothing short of
underwhelming now what has happened here is this is a Thread certified device and
it has the capability of connecting to an existing Thread network and I spoke
with Google support about this we kind of talked through what was possible and
what wasn't it's not a border router so that means you can't start the thread
network in your home with this device so it can be added and really becomes a
repeater in that kind of a Thread Network so that's nice to have but if
you don't already have a Thread network started this doesn't help you at all and
I wonder if this will change over time and it should change over time because
this is honestly a very disappointing component to me and I think a lot of
people were waiting for Google to kind of launch their automation capabilities
here but there's no differences in routines there's no differences in what
this can control really and therefore it's not really doing anything new for
us in terms of home automation for you international folks like me or outside
of the US well you're going to be missing some of the features I mean even
during setup I didn't have any access to any sort of TV services and you can get
that YouTube TV subscription service in the US but you can't get that here in
Canada you can't get that in most countries and then you don't even have
access during setup to set up other TV or video services so Netflix also does
not work no matter where you are you can't even
cast Netflix to this that's a big problem with the screen looking as good
as it is I want to see these services get out to other countries very very
quickly with all this said my recommendation has to be twofold it's
it's kind of one for people who are new to the smart speaker or smart display
game and then one for those of you with some of these other devices sitting next
to me so let's start with those of you who are new now what I'll tell you is I
had to kind of step back and stop comparing to these devices because
honestly you got to think about the hardware level and the software level
and they are incredible on both counts in this device to think about what
you're getting for two hundred and thirty dollars us and we'll see the
sales I think they'll be very aggressive but I don't know if we're going under a
hundred and fifty here ever so we'll see what that pricing but still even if even
at that regular pricing this is a very good smart display or smart speaker to
start with it has incredible capabilities and you're not going to go
wrong you're not overspending and I really can recommend this as the best
Google Assistant display overall now the other side of my recommendation is for
those of you who have some of these devices in your home some of these other
smart displays really what I'm going to tell you here is that the upgrades are
significant but they are incomplete and really you know for someone who owns
these kinds of products you're going to kind of look at this device and go yeah
that's that's a great improvement of feature but I'm frustrated and the nest
camera is a great example of that it's disjointed experience the fact that
you're going to have to migrate your Nest account in order to install the
device is a frustration and a real issue for a lot of people the missing
improvements in Google's automation and the thread border router kind of being
missing here on this device to really give you that start in a whole new world
of automation both of those things or all of those things might cause you to
wait a little bit here and see what the game is from Google how much they're
going to deliver on here if those things don't really bother you and you're just
looking for an upgraded experience I can tell you this is
100% the best multimedia experience there is out there today so guys you're
going to be able to go ahead and watch more about the Nest Hub Max we're gonna
build a pretty big volume of videos here about this device because it is top
level so go ahead watch those now they're up on screen otherwise don't
hate automate