Heh. We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. Now that's a hardware mute.
Speakers much larger than headphone speakers tend to be very poor at such a thing since it gets a lot harder to move the voice coil as weight and pressure from the surround dampen everything. Anything capable of reproducing appreciable bass will almost certainly not work.
Yea - I don't think voice commands are a feature particularly desired for speakers. There are only a few instances I can think of where I want my speaker to respond to voice commands - when I'm in the shower and when I want it to be silent so I can take a call being the primary ones. For the former I think just having a playlist on shuffle is good enough and the for the latter there are better solutions available by integrating my phone into the system.
Using voice commands to control music has always seemed like a sisyphean task to me. You're using a control method that directly conflicts with the state you'll generally use it in and song/artist names are so dense and confused that oftentimes you'll need multiple commands to hone in on what you actually want.
My "smart speaker" (aka desktop computer with massive speakers) is simply controlled by spotify sync which is absolutely not amazing but it's also not not terrible and far easier to control than times I've tried shouting at voice devices in the past.
The mic in these home devices is, imo, 90% for cooking and 7%[1] for other alarms and timers - they're relatively poor music platforms and only moved into the space because of how subsidized they were by Amazon and other companies.
1. (edit) bumped down from 9% to 7% because smart lights and thermostats are also quite prevalent.
So what you wanted was a wireless speaker? I think when most people say "smart speaker" they mean a speaker that they can control using the speaker itself, so not just a speaker tethered via bluetooth/wifi.
I just started mentally replacing "smart" with "spy" in product names a few years ago, and it's been a generally helpful heuristic as to their tradeoffs.
Considering the only apparent difference between the two is method of control and people love complaining about voice analysis miscomprehending I doubt there is much distance between those two terms in most consumers minds. I think in general marketing loves slapping "smart" in front of other nouns and it's usually received a lot worse than they expect to the point where most consumers ignore it as much as other fluff terms like "Next Gen".
The difference for me is a lot broader. A wireless speaker to me mostly means a bluetooth speaker. A smart speaker means internet connected, firmware updates, feature-creep, TOS/EULA crap and a probably-sooner-than-I-expected end-of-life.
Pretty certain! I inspected the board closely, and tested after reassembly to make sure it couldn't hear me anymore. That Nest Mini lives with its mute-switch permanently engaged anyway, just as a fallback.
