At $99.99, it matches the Echo Dot Max on price, and like that speaker, it doubles as a smart home hub, offering a Thread border router and Matter support, allowing it to connect to the current wave of smart home gear through the Google Home app. Mesh Wi-Fi routers with built-in smart assistants turn each satellite base into a smart hub that boosts network signals to each room of your house while also serving as a smart speaker. Since the essential purpose of a smart home hub is to control devices, I benchmarked the time it took for each hub to trigger an action by setting each hub on the same marked point from a 5-GHz router and asking each device to turn on the same light.