The Google Home Max is too loud and too expensive — and you should absolutely buy it (GOOG, GOOGL)

Google Home Max

The Google Home Max is loud.

Like, really, really loud.

It's so loud that it drowns out noisy roommates blasting an NBA game, or insistent sirens right outside.

It's so loud that if you have it cranked up between you and another person, you probably won't able to hear them.

There's more to the Google Home Max than its volume, though. It's nice to look at, dead-simple to use, and has the Google Assistant built in, the best smart assistant on the market.

In fact, after using the Home Max for a few weeks, I'm struggling to find anything bad to say about it. Here's why:

The Google Home Max has the best smart assistant available, period.

The Home Max has Google Assistant built in, which in my experience is the best smart assistant around. It seems to understand our natural way of speaking better than its peers, and can easily translate commands like "Hey Google, turn it up a little bit" or "OK Google, put on some relaxing music."

The Assistant has a good memory, too. I was impressed by one scenario where I asked it what the weather was going to be like the next day. The Assistant answered immediately — and when my boyfriend entered the room a few minutes later and said, "Hey Google, I didn't hear you," it repeated the same response.

The Assistant exceeded every expectation. I've long struggled to find the need for smart assistants in my everyday life, but now I'm sold.

The design is boring, but that's a good thing.

The design of the Home Max isn't revolutionary.

The speaker can sit either vertically or horizontally and is not wireless. It uses the same soft fabric on the speaker as the Home Mini, and while I tested the white and gray version, the Home Max also comes in black.

At first I was a little disappointed that the Home Max doesn't look all that different from most speakers. It doesn't have a futuristic design and it doesn't look particularly modern.

But I eventually came to see that as an advantage. The speaker is sleek and unobtrusive, and looks just as good sitting on my desk as it would in a living room or kitchen. It blends into its surroundings rather than becoming the centerpiece.

The Home Max has subtle manual controls.

While you can control the Home Max hands-free, there are subtle, built-in buttons, too.

Tapping on the thin gray line on the top of the speaker lets you play and pause the music, while swiping toward the left or right next to it turns the volume up or down.

These manual controls on the speaker came in handy a few times, like one instance where the Assistant didn't quite understand what I needed.

While lying in bed one night, I asked the Assistant to set an alarm for the next morning. But when I asked it to turn the alarm volume up, it blasted music at full volume, forcing me to jump out of bed and run across the room to manually shut it off.

I'm sure my neighbors didn't love the loud music at 11 p.m., but at least I could shut the whole thing off without having to yell at it over the music (although, to be honest, a remote would have been great in that situation).

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