Gemini Intelligence is Coming to Google Home

While splashy chatbots may get all the attention, generative AI has real potential to make the smart home simpler and more accessible. Amazon has already announced its plans for a smarter Alexa to power your home. Now, it’s Google’s turn to promise that it can produce a better, smarter, more helpful Google Assistant.

Ahead of its fall hardware event next week, Google announced three new Gemini intelligence-powered experiences it plans to bring to its Google Home smart home platform later this year. There’s a new camera intelligence feature that generates descriptive captions for video footage from Nest cameras, a natural language input for creating Google Home routines, and a smarter Google Assistant for Nest smart speakers and displays with an all-new voice.

New Features and Enhancements

Camera Intelligence: Descriptive Captions for Video Footage

Google is using Gemini intelligence on Nest cameras to allow them to understand what they see and hear and then tell you what’s most important. Instead of just getting an alert for a person or package and having to watch the video to see what happened, Google Home will add a detailed description of what the camera saw. The models will learn and train on your data in the cloud but for your home, getting smarter over time to better understand what’s happening around your home.

One example shared was a clip of a person unloading groceries from a car with the caption: "A young person in casual clothing, standing next to a parked black SUV. They are carrying grocery bags. The car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful."

These captions provide context that, alongside being helpful, could translate to smarter home automation. For example, if a camera detects an animal and understands that “the dog is digging in the garden,” the next step could be to create an automation to “turn on the sprinklers.”

There will also be an option to use text to search through footage in the Google Home activity tab. This could be handy when, say, your cat sneaks out after dark. You could ask it to show you the last time it spotted the cat rather than having to scroll through every video tagged with an animal to find him.

Home Automation Made Easier

A new “Help me create” feature in the Google Home app lets you describe what you want to happen — such as “lock the doors and turn off the lights at bedtime” — and have it create a routine to do it automatically. You need to use the text or speech input in the Home app on your phone (it doesn’t work through Nest speakers), but it will have all the current capabilities of the Google Home app. This includes all the current starters, conditions, and actions, plus access to any device connected to Google Home, including Matter devices. While it’s not as complex or sophisticated as Google’s script editor, it should make creating automations easy for anyone.

Google Assistant Gets New Voices

Besides easier automations and camera intelligence, Google says it’s improving the “core experiences” of its Google Assistant — such as playing music and setting timers — on all current Nest smart speakers and displays. Plus, Google Assistant is getting new voices with different styles, tones, and accents. The company released a demo of the first new voice engaging in some conversational back and forth. It retains the female tone but sounds lighter and more natural.

The new Google Assistant will be able to maintain the context of your conversation and start to learn and understand your home. The Gemini-powered capabilities will run “in the cloud, for your home” in accordance with Google’s privacy principles. The models will build an understanding of your home — such as the rooms and devices you have — and then build on that baseline to get smarter over time.

Future of Google Home

All of these features — aside from the new voice — will be paywalled behind Google’s Nest Aware subscription, its video recording subscription for Nest cameras that starts at $8 a month (approximately ₹660) or $80 a year (approximately ₹6,600). The features will launch first in Google’s Public Preview beta program to a limited number of Nest Aware subscribers and will roll out to more users next year.

The launch of the Google TV Streamer 4K, which serves as a Google Home hub, and a new Nest Learning Thermostat, combined with the promise of a smarter Google Assistant, signifies a brighter future for Google Home users.

The digital voice assistant is moving closer to the vision Google and its competitors have been working toward for years: a genuinely helpful assistant. This sets the path for the next era of Google Home. As Anish Kattukaran, Google Home’s head of product, explains, “The home is a beast.” It’s complicated and messy, with multiple characters and scenarios. It’s hard enough for a human to manage, making it a significant challenge for a computer. But it seems Amazon, Google, and Apple are now all racing toward a future where our homes have an intelligent, context-aware assistant that can help respond to our needs. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out.

For the latest updates on Google Home and other smart home technologies, stay tuned to Kushal Bharat Tech News.