Google has announced a massive upgrade to its Google Home app and Gemini for Home, an AI upgrade that transforms how you interact with your smart home devices. The app’s redesign, aligned with the Gemini for Home upgrade, now loads significantly faster, with a simplified layout that includes three tabs, and Nest devices and features are now integrated.
Redesigned Google Home app
With this latest redesign, Google promises a faster loading time. For users with cameras, live views now load 30% faster with a 40% decrease in playback failures. Further, the app now integrates core Nest devices and features — including all Nest Thermostat models since 2015, smoke and CO emergency alerts for Nest Protect, and passcode management for the Nest x Yale Lock—offering a unified experience.
The Google Home app now gets a simplified three-tab layout that makes it easy to get to the key areas of your home.
- The Home Tab: This is your consolidated overview and access point for your whole home. The company introduced new gestures that make it much more fluid to use with a single hand, letting you easily swipe between your Favorites, all devices, and dedicated dashboards without having to switch tabs.
- The Activity Tab: This is now the single history for everything that happens in your home, with events from all your connected first-party and third-party devices. This is where you’ll find Home Brief to get a quick summary of your day.
- The Automations Tab: This tab now features a new carousel at the top that shows upcoming automations scheduled to run in your home. The company has rebuilt the editor to provide a fast, native experience on both iOS and Android. Now, by simply describing an automation like, “Create an automation to turn on the porch lights and lock the front door every day at sunset,” you can unlock powerful capabilities, such as creating one-time automations or using new conditional starters so a routine only runs if someone is home.
Gemini for Home
Gemini for Home is a new, foundational intelligence that transforms your relationship with your home, says Google. Gemini not only replaces the Google Assistant on your smart displays and speakers but also upgrades the smarts of devices in your home, like your cameras and doorbells, as well as in the Google Home app.
Thanks to Gemini’s conversational context and its ability to understand vague human context, it can better help you across the main ways you use your assistant today: media, household coordination, and smart home control. You can use commands to test Gemini’s latest capabilities:
- “Hey Google, play the song from the movie where a bunch of oil workers fly to space to blow up an asteroid,” or find a podcast by asking, “Hey Google, play a recent podcast featuring Sundar Pichai,” and Gemini will understand and find the show and episode for you.
- Or, “Hey Google, my dishwasher isn’t draining, what should I check first?” You can follow up simply with, “Hey Google, the filter looks good, what should I check next?” Gemini understands you’re still talking about the dishwasher.
- Or, when you want to have an even more free-flowing conversation, you can say, “Hey Google, let’s chat,” to talk to Gemini Live.
To better assist you with smart home control through natural language conversation, Gemini now handles complex requests. You can say something like, “Hey Google, I’m about to cook, can you turn on the lights by the stove,” and it will know to turn on the lights in the kitchen downstairs.
Gemini capabilities for Smart Cameras
Another significant upgrade that Google added is that Gemini turns your smart cameras into true “AI” cameras. Now, Gemini will have access to camera footage and will offer AI descriptions of scenarios, home briefs, and requests for video history.
- Al descriptions: Gemini now provides Al descriptions directly in your alerts and your camera video history, giving you a full, detailed narrative of what’s happening.
- Home Brief: Now, instead of sifting through hundreds of alerts, you can get a quick recap with Gemini. It summarizes hours of footage, proactively delivering a quick, digestible recap of your day’s important events in your
Home Brief—taking the work out of having a smart home. - Ask Home for video history: Search your video history using natural language—just ask. “Did something eat my plants?”—and it pulls up the relevant video clips.
This elimates low-context alerts like “motion detected,” “person detected,” and “package detected” seen on current smart cameras and offers a better AI-assisted experience.
Availability
The redesigned Google Home app started rolling out globally today. Users can update via the Play Store or App Store.
The new Gemini for Home is coming to every speaker, smart display, camera, and doorbell of Google, along with the new Google Home app. It will be available via an early access program. The early access rollout for these devices will begin this month (with speakers and smart displays starting towards the end of the month).
Gemini Live, AI-powered Notifications, Home Brief, searching your video history and creating automations with Ask Home will be available through our new Google Home Premium subscription. Plans start at $10 a month and are also included with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions at no extra cost.