Bose Home Speaker 500

Great for the bedroom – This Home speaker gives a great sound and what is even better it does by voice command "Hey Google " and turns off by voice command. You can command it to be your alarm clock and wake you to nice music. Perfect addition to any bedroom or house to play music or any radio station .

Great Audio, but has its issues – Bought as part of a JB HiFI monthly flash special, I have owned the Bose Speaker 500 since April 2020. Bose is a favourite brand, also owning a Soundlink Speaker, and QC35II and QC15 headsets. The 500 normally resides in the master bedroom as a bedside clock, alarm, Spotify music player and for use as a Google Assistant. It is also used on the back deck as a music player as a stand-alone speaker, or as part of a Speaker Group where I use the Bose’s AUX socket with a Chromecast Audio dongle connected.

I consider music quality to be excellent for such a small device. Wi-Fi operation is also excellent, sometimes used ~15m from the WI-Fi Router through three walls.

However… it has/has had a number of issues, suggesting underdone software and Google Assistant integration: - One night at ~3am it decided to start “screeching”, loudly. Power cycling required. - Other times it has gone to full volume, a bit of a shock when you get a loud reply from Google Asst. - Changing back to normal Wi-Fi operation from AUX input sometimes doesn't work, power cycling required. - Its microphone seems a bit deaf, the old Google Home (Original) in the ensuite 6m away and around a corner often responds rather than the Bose that’s less than 2m away.

The small colour display showing music album information is a nice touch, however the stylised time display is small and hard to read.

The Bose Music app is a very basic offering minimal interaction with the Speaker 500. Software updates have been minimal since I’ve had it.

Disappointing – Purchased this for Christmas 2020, and we have been trying to love it since......but it keeps letting us down. Whilst the sound quality is good....very good in fact.....it is the functionality that is flawed. It was a real struggle to program the pre-set buttons to our favorite radio stations, but having nailed that, we now find the Alexa voice command function to be annoyingly unreliable. When you turn it on (or switch from one station to another) it plays an advert prior to connecting to the station each time (probably not Bose's fault, but annoying as hell). Sometimes Alexa won't turn the unit off, so we have to switch it off at the wall. Sometimes when you turn it on it starts on FULL VOLUME......which is not ideal when the rest of the household is still asleep (WAS asleep). Sometimes it just won't play any radio stations at all.....none of the pre-sets will respond....and Alexa is unresponsive. Very frustrating. In summary, I regret purchasing this unit - especially given the $500+ price tag. :-/ Bose has a reputation for hi-end products, but they have let themselves down with this product.

Great Speaker, Great Sound, Great Features – I purchased my Bose Home Speaker whilst holidaying in the US. Regardless, I purchased it several hundreds of dollars cheaper than here in Oz. However, after a simple set up process my Bose Home 500 was set and ready to go. The system has either Amazon Alexa or Google Assist as your Smart access. I set up my digital stations, set up my Spotify account and we are up and running. The sound that comes out of this little unit is incredible; great highs, mids and bass notes combine to give you a great full sounding unit. We set up (via Google Assist) an alarm to wake up by in the morning....there are some items Google cannot do on this system but I guess this will change over time.

The only negative is the fact that, for some reason, Bose did not make this unit compatible with the rest of the Bose products available...but that is only a minor thing

Otherwise I highly recommend the Bose Home Speaker 500 for any household wanting great sounding music with Google Assist.

Good sound but lacklustre home assistant integration – Well, I bought this speaker on the strength of my experience with the sound quality of another Bose speaker and also due to the Google Assistant integration. Setup was fairly straight forward, which involved downloading the Bose Music and installation as per the app's instructions and connection to my home network within the app. Firstly, the sound quality. While it is good, it is not as immersive or wide as you would hope from a $500+ speaker. Secondly, the support for Google Assistant is only partial and, quite frankly, more than a little disappointing. Why? Well, Bose doesn't play nicely with some streaming services so my Google Music and YouTube Music are not supported and therefore would not play. OK, so I had to subscribe to Spotify Premium and alter my music streaming settings for my other Google Home speakers to Spotify. This was mildly annoying. Next, the Bose HS 500 speaker is not able to be grouped with my other Google Home speakers. This is even more annoying as I had hoped that Google Assistant support would, naturally, include this feature. So, I'm left with a speaker that us basically a standalone that won't sync with the others. My advice? Unless you're a Bose addict, buy another speaker such as the Google Home Max (some $200 cheaper) for a proper, fully integrated home system. Oh, did I add that Bose are not very responsive to customer requests for improvements to their products? Go online and search for Bose Community discussions - even getting any information about the introduction of Google Assistant (partial) support in Australia was poor. I do wish, in hindsight, that I had purchased the Google Home Max for a more seamless integration into my home network at a few hundred $AU saving!