Google Home Max coming to Canada on May 16 for $499

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Toronto - Smart speakers come in a number of varieties. You have the cheaper hockey-puck sized mini speakers that connect to the Internet easily enought but, because of their size, don't sound great. You have the larger coffee mug sized speakers that sound a bit better but only have so much room to accomodate bass. At the top end, you get the large smart speakers that are geared towards bigger sound with more complex audio capabilities.

All these speakers do the same thing and some even allow you to hook up to your existing loudspeakers to get that Hi-Fi sound. For homes that don't have a high-fidelity speaker, Google is offering its Google Home Max speaker as the one to rule them all.

Launched in the US last year, Google Home Max will finally make it to Canada starting May 16. It's a homecoming of sorts for this Made By Google product since a lot of the software and engineering was done right here in Kitchener, where Google has a lot of talented Canadian engineers plugging away on things like Google Home and the stellar Google WiFi Mesh router. Google's Montreal group provided a lot of the French language features and comprehension that make this a truly Canadina and bilingual device. C'est bon!

Google Home can stream music from YouTube, Google Play, Spotify and various other services.

Touted as being 20 times more powerful than your garden variety smart speaker, the Google Home Max is a serious boombox for the smart speaker niche.  Google Home Max has some special powers. It is smart enough to acoustically tune itself based on the location and placement. It can also alter volume based on ambient sound and will continue to get features as Google adds features via software updates.

You can also splurge on two Google Home Max speakers for a stereo pair to tune your party room to the next level.