HomePod Mini is primarily a speaker you can AirPlay to which happens to have some basic voice control functionality. I'd really love them to be a bit more usable (in particular I want to be able to change the app it sends reminders to) but my experience has been that they're fine for music, timers, and basic smart home control.
I guess my age is showing, but isn't it just a mono speaker? so much is lost in music without stereo imaging. it's one of the main eyebrow raising things to me about most bluetooth portable speakers. If you're mainly listening to podcasts or playing lullabyes to a kids room, sure, but we're adults here and personally I like listening to stereo way to much for these to be an option.
Definitely showing how deep down the Apple rabbit hole I am but I have a pair of them connected to my Apple TV which are the ones I use for music/TV/games. The single one in the kitchen really only gets used for podcasts and audio from the iPad I have for watching YouTube and trashy TV while cooking.
Yup, its about as slick as you could ask for. They appear as a single device to anything connecting and then distribute the left/right channels between each other. I've also got the Apple TV set to use them as its default set of speakers, and that handles ARC over HDMI from the TV to send audio from anything else plugged in to them.
+1 to this we had a set of HomePod minis for intercom and not only do they not work reliably, but the diagnostics provided when they fail are non-existent, making it hard to improve the setup.
We have Google Home Minis in every room and the screens in bedroom and kitchen and the only thing that works reliably to message intra-room is to say "Hey Google, broadcast message" because half of the time it will tell me it can't send messages yet. If someone knows what I'm doing wrong I'd love to hear it since this would be a great feature.
To be honest, I'm honestly sick of Google Home's approach to this since the Gemini update has turned everything really slow and I'm getting close to the point where I'd rather home-roll a full system myself that works reliably instead of the crapshoot that this is. Home Assistant seems to have a functionality bridge to Google Home connected devices like my blinds or cameras so I should be able to retain the edge devices but I have half a mind to just dump the whole thing and start over.
At least on the HomePod side, intercom is at best a half-baked feature and at worst an infuriation machine. It uses a cumbersome voice trigger ("siri, tell <room>…") to begin recording audio, with no clear indication of when recording began and no way to know for sure that the audio was directed where you wanted it to go.
To respond is similarly cumbersome and soon you give up completely. I can only assume it was designed by someone whose parents were killed in an intercom-related disaster and has sworn revenge.
I bought a mini for my office with this purpose in mind, but it has been a total waste.
Setting timers works well though