Google Home Mini

[Joshua Luther1]

Does anyone still use these in 2026? We still have one in our kitchen but have found it more buggy and unreliable for anything useful. It will often chime as if we said Hey Google but we didn't say anything remotely close to that. And just the other day my wife said, "What time does the Michigan UConn game come on." And before she could finish saying it, it responds, "What time what." It wasn't until we said "When does the Michigan UConn game come on" did it give us the answer. To me, that is just stupid.

I will say my daughter uses hers to listen to music in the shower all the time. She'll play music from her phone then play it on her mini.

And, I guess this is flaw of Roku, but we couldn't connect our two Home Minis in our bedroom to our Roku TV to use as speakers. You have to buy Roku branded speakers for them to use as a Bluetooth speakers.

Before our kids had phones, we used them to broadcast messages to them when they were in their rooms. And they would ask it questions and play music or ask them to tell them jokes.

It's just a shame that we aren't able to use them as Bluetooth speakers for our bedroom tv. Because the Roku TVs in my opinion are far superior to Google TVs. And the fact that they seem to be getting dumber and dumber and more useless. But I guess that's Google hardware for you. They phase out certain things and stop updating them.