Nine questions to ask before you buy a smart speaker

▝ How important is the choice of voice assistant?

If you’re going to have more than one smart speaker in your home, then the first job is to work out which voice assistant you want. While there’s nothing to stop you from buying speakers that use different voice assistants, doing so can make life harder: you’ll need to set up your smart speakers under different apps and you’ll have to add music services and smart devices more than once. That’s just a lot of hassle.

With devices all using the same voice assistant, you’ll get more features, such as room-to-room calling and messaging. So, our advice is to select the right voice assistant for your needs, and then choose speakers that use that. Our guide to Amazon Alexa vs Google Assistant () gives you more information on this, and the individual Apple HomePod Mini review on p80 tells