FYI, just a heads up that @rauli2780 who calls himself rauli2780 on GitHub as well as RauliConcernedVet on Reddit has announced then he is also planning to try reimplementing a fully open-source drop-in replacement PCB concept based on the Home Assistant Voice PE schematics but for the newer Google Nest Audio speaker (which is the big-brother model released in 2020 that acts as the larger successor to the original Google Home smart speaker and the mini speakers).
He has started his own thread about that in this Home Assistant community forum here:
You can read what he has written so far about his ideas for that project here in his GitHub repo:
And here on Reddit (which looks poorky formatted in a code block so ping @rauli2780 to fix that):
- https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1qz1pmq/opensource_dropin_pcb_for_google_nest_audio/
It is unclear how serious he is about actually going through with that as got no idea of his skillset or experience in PCB design, so far he only posted prerequisites and specifications he hope to achieve with no indication on progress or plan for the PCB design itself, but he has at least started a discussions forum for it in the GitHub repository for community feedback and input in the public, which I think is great for full transparency, see:
Hardware-wise the newer Google Nest Audio speaker model have a much larger speaker element so the sound quality it could be capable of should be a lot better and much louder volume than the minis. I also believe it might have more space to work on for the PCB design so in theory one could possibly fit additional features, such as example using two ESP32 chips with preferably an ESP32-P4 acting as the main application MCU and the addition of a second ESP32-C6 to act as a dedicated co-processor for wireless communications.