Gemini for Google Home has arrived and, with it, a glimpse of Google’s view of the future of the smart home. But that future is still held back by the simple fact that, like anything with AI, it makes too many mistakes.
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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had Gemini for Home active with my Google Nest devices and my feelings are pretty split. On the one hand, Gemini adds a lot of impressive new functionality to the experience.
Starting with “Ask Home,” the ability to just search for a thing that happened instead of combing through footage is awesome. Being able to know my camera was watching and ask “where is my laptop” only to get a response is just… well, it’s the future, isn’t it?
Of course, search is just one piece of that puzzle, and it’s built in part on Gemini’s ability to see a Nest Cam feed and intelligently label the event with what it saw. Again, super useful! Frankly, it’s a little crazy this isn’t how the smart home has always worked. Truly, it’s just invaluable, because previously, your only indication regarding what the camera saw was basically “here’s this person” or “hey look, a dog” or “well, something definitely moved,” meaning the task of figuring out when an event happened fell on you. Looking back, generic notifications just weren’t enough.
This also leads to the third big piece of Gemini for Home, which is “Home Brief,” a daily summary of your Nest Cam recordings.The idea here is to give you a quick overview of what happened over the course of the day, rather than just relying on you constantly watching your notification feed. Neat!
But, it doesn’t always work.
Each of these three pillars of the new Gemini-enhanced Google Home experience has its own set of issues, and they take away from what is otherwise an incredibly smart way to treat the smart home.
Starting with notification labels, this succumbs to the same trap that every AI product faces – absurd overconfidence.
Gemini’s summaries of what happened in a given piece of Nest footage are sometimes accurate, but sometimes make Google Home look like a fool. For every “Ben is in the kitchen cooking chicken” – yes, it managed to correctly recognize chicken – there’s a “Ben loads a bicycle into the car” when, in fact, I did not. It’s usually minor stuff like this. Mislabeling an object that’s not quite sure what to do with. For instance, the “bicycle” I took out of the car was actually a disc golf cart (which looks nothing like a bike), and I didn’t actually take it out of the car in the clip that was…
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