If you take the Google Home Mini's $79 CAD price into consideration, the device is an impressive smart home assistant.

Affordable; Sleek and small; Voice control works great

Sound quality is poor; Lacks Alexa's skills; just like the Google Home; No direct competitors in the Canadian market

The new, cut-down version of the digital assistant could probably have been summed up in a tweet. Something like: "Home Mini: smaller, cheaper, sound worse but still fine."

It's almost unfair that most of the world met our voice-controlled future in the form of an Amazon Echo. Sure, the gadget works, but damn is it ugly. The Google Home was better but still sort of silly-looking. That's why the sleek, minimalist Google Home Mini feels like a revelation.

It's been a year since Google introduced the world to Google Home, one of the company's first physical hardware products and generally the best way to interact with the then-nascent Google Assistant.

Well over a year after the launch of the Amazon Echo Dot, Google finally has a competitor out. Announced alongside the all-new second generation Pixel smartphones, the device might have gotten a bit overshadowed but fret not, we've been testing it out the last few days and have a review ready for...

It's almost unfair that most of the world met our voice-controlled future in the form of an Amazon Echo. Sure, the gadget works, but damn is it ugly. The Google Home was better but still sort of silly-looking. That's why the sleek, minimalist Google Home Mini feels like a revelation.

Beautiful hardware design; great software design

No headphone jack

For $50 or less, you're simply not going to find a better speaker that does so much. While Alexa still holds the crown for smart home integration, Google is catching up every day, and offers a considerably better virtual assistant than any other company out there in a number of ways.

ImageTagInstance gallery-187c452f-43f0-4c91-aa86-2ffe63d95951 When Wi-Fi speakers started infiltrating the market, we were eerily skeptical about them – mainly because we had grown accustomed to Bluetooth-enabled ones. Call it being complacent or whatever, Bluetooth speakers provided the convenience of allowing almost any device to connect to them without complication. So, when we started seeing a shift in the market to these Wi-Fi-connected ones, many of us wondered how much of a change in the product field they’d bring.Change they brought, in the most revolutionary way! Last year's Google Home helped to spark that shift, as it offered consumers more than just another speaker for music. Rather, it has integrated itself into the home in more ways than we could've imagined, and as time went on, its functions helped to solidify its importance in the evolving smart home.Having seen so much success in such a short period, Google introduced a smaller, more "mini" edition of its popular smar...