Google starts sharing Gemini for Home rollout plans

For the past couple years, Google has been working to flesh out its next-gen AI efforts, and offering us plenty of opportunities to try out that progress for ourselves. But now in 2025, Gemini is becoming less of an option, and more of an inevitability. That’s already started with Assistant on our phones, and now we’re getting ready for it to extend across smart speakers and displays, as Google shares its plans about Gemini for Home.

Gemini for Home will be ready to handle many of the same sort of tasks you rely on Assistant for now, like navigating smart home controls, playing media, and helping you organize your day. Compared to Assistant, Google says users can look forward to a system that’s better able to understand even complex requests — like adjusting smart home settings everywhere except for a specific room. And just like you’re familiar with from on your phone, it will be happy to try answering whatever questions you throw at it.

That Gemini support on your smart devices will extend to Gemini Live, letting you engage in natural-feeling back-and-forth conversations with Google’s agent. That sounds particularly useful when you’re tackling a task you’re wildly unfamiliar with, and want to try relying on Google’s AI “smarts” to offer a little reassurance as you have it walk you through the steps — and hopefully not mess anything up too badly.

Google Assistant on your smart speaker may read classic bedtime stories to your kids, but Gemini for Home on your smart speaker will take that to the next level by creating a custom story based on your prompts.

While there’s a lot that sounds promising here, the devil’s in the details, and there are still plenty of edge cases where Gemini just hasn’t been able to function at quite the same level that Assistant has — juggling multiple calendars and multiple languages stand out as some particular pain points in our mind. We’ve reached out to Google in the hopes of getting some assurance that these areas might be getting better, but so far we just have faith to go on.

When does all this start going down? Early access is set to begin this October, and while you may be able to stick with classic Assistant for the immediate future, Google is crystal clear that Gemini for Home is the future, and eventually the plan is to have it full-on replace Assistant on smart-home devices.

Finally, Google leaves us with an ominous hint of things to come, noting that Gemini for Home will exist as “free and paid versions.” So far the sort of Gemini access we’d have to pay for has been relegated to stuff like content generation and access to its most advanced reasoning models. That leaves us extremely curious (and more than a little worried) to learn what sort of features might end up behind a paywall when we’re specifically talking about Gemini for Home. Hopefully we start getting those answers soon.