- Early adopters are seeing Gemini for Home rolling out
- It enables natural language prompts and queries
- Early access is limited by device and country at the moment
Gemini for Home is official, and rolling out now to those who’ve opted into the early access program and who live in the right countries. The first users are already experimenting with the features available in the upgraded smart home AI, including some ruthless pet monitoring.
This is the long-promised upgrade from Google Assistant to Google Gemini for smart home gadgets, which means your requests and queries can be more complex, and in language that’s more conversational. In return, you get smarter replies, digging into details about what’s happening with your Google Home devices.
Although Gemini will eventually make it to a host of different Google gadgets – going back an entire decade – right now you need to sign up through the Google Home app for early access. As spotted by Android Authority, those early adopters are now seeing the enhanced features show up on their phones.
Right now, early access is limited to doorbells and cameras in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, and some features are paywalled. The details of the Gemini rollout can be somewhat confusing, and Google has now published a long list of answers to commonly asked user questions.
‘Was my dog doing anything bad?’
One of the upgrades that Gemini brings with it (for free) is a new Ask Home feature: you can use natural language queries to check what your devices are reporting, and get summaries of captured video events with details added by AI analysis.
Over on Reddit, one user asked “was my dog doing anything bad?” and was told that yes, a black dog jumped up on the counter at precisely 7.36pm. It’s an example of the sort of detail Gemini can go into, and another Reddit example shows Gemini identifying the colors and types of vehicles passing by.
This extends to the new Home Briefing feature as well, as you can see in this Reddit thread. Gemini recognizes school buses passing by, and concludes it must be school pick-up time. Bicycles, people, squirrels, and FedEx trucks are also recognized – handy if you want to know whether or not a delivery driver has visited.
It all sounds pretty promising, though plenty of bugs are being reported too. That’s to be expected from an early access program like this, and hopefully the issues all get fixed speedily, so everyone can get the Gemini for Home upgrade – perhaps in time for the launch of the new Google Home Speaker early next year.
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