The AI Smart Home is Finally Here: Gemini Powers Up Google Home

In the Made by Google podcast episode produced by Google, I joined host Rashid Finch to walk through a major milestone for the Google Home ecosystem. As Senior Director of Product Management for the Home team, I talked about how Gemini—our next-generation AI—reimagines what a smart home can do. In this article I’ll explain, in detail, what’s new, why it matters, how we built it, and what you can expect in the months ahead. I’ll cover Gemini for the home, Gemini Live, Ask Home and camera intelligence, the redesigned Google Home app, Google Home Premium (which replaces Nest Aware), our new hardware, partner devices, and how this all fits together into what I call Home 2.0.

🤖 What is Gemini for the Home?

Gemini for the home is the fusion of our latest language models and multimodal capabilities with everything you already rely on in Google Home: speakers, smart displays, cameras, doorbells, automation, and the Home app. When I say “Gemini for the home,” I mean more than a voice that’s smarter. I mean a system that understands context, remembers the thread of a conversation, interprets camera scenes semantically, and helps people accomplish everyday tasks at home more naturally.

At its core, Gemini for the home upgrades three big areas simultaneously:

Conversational intelligence: Gemini brings deeper language understanding so you can speak more naturally and get better results. It remembers context, can follow up, and supports much more fluid back-and-forth interactions.
Multimodal understanding: Cameras and doorbells become intelligent sensors that don’t just detect motion and objects but interpret scenes and provide meaningful descriptions and searchable history.
App and cloud integration: The Google Home app becomes the central place for your entire smart home, with faster performance, a simpler layout, and seamless access to Nest devices that used to be in a separate app.

The goal was simple in idea but complex in execution: take the best of Gemini on phones and computers and adapt that power to the home, where interactions are ambient, communal, and often incomplete. For example, the home is used by many people—partners, kids, grandparents, babysitters—so the system has to be helpful to the whole household, not just one person. That shaped our decisions around accessibility, simplicity, and shared experiences.

I’m proud to say we’re rolling out Gemini for the home as an early access starting in October. It will come to essentially every Google-made speaker, smart display, camera, and doorbell we’ve shipped in the last decade. That means you likely don’t need to buy new hardware to benefit from Gemini’s improvements—your existing devices will get smarter.

What Gemini can do that the classic Assistant could not

People often ask, “If I already have Google Assistant, what’s new?” The short answer: everything you expect plus a new level of natural interaction. As a baseline, Gemini for Home does all the reliable, predictable things Assistant did: play media, set timers, manage calendars, and control smart home devices. But Gemini upgrades how those interactions happen.

Discovery and fuzzy memory: Instead of needing exact names, Gemini can find things based on fuzzy descriptions. “Play the song from the show with Gabby and some dollhouse that has the word ‘sprinkle’ in it” is now a natural request that works. That mirrors how human memory and language actually operate.
Conversational clarity: You can start with outcomes instead of mechanical steps. Instead of calculating cook time manually, you can say “Set a timer for cooking a steak,” and Gemini will ask clarifying questions—thickness, doneness, etc.—and then set a precise timer.
Higher-level automations: Ask in plain language for what you want—“Make me feel safer while I’m traveling”—and Gemini can suggest and create automations for locks, simulated presence, lighting behavior, and more.

In short, Gemini is less about replacing Assistant’s core capabilities and more about making them more human, more intuitive, and more helpful.

🗣️ Gemini Live: the future of conversational home AI

One of the most exciting parts of this release is Gemini Live, which I see as a glimpse of the “conversational partner” future for the home. Gemini Live lets you have an open, ongoing conversation without needing to re-invoke the hotword for every utterance. You can pause, interrupt, and interject—very much like a natural conversation in your kitchen or living room.

How does it work in practice? You might say, “Google, let’s chat,” and the device will enter a live mode. From there you can throw in extra context while Gemini is responding. For example, you might ask for recipe ideas based on a few ingredients, then interrupt and add dietary constraints, or ask Gemini to hide spinach from a kid-friendly meal. This back-and-forth feels like talking with someone who understands the thread and can update the answer in real time.

Gemini Live does have hardware requirements because of the continuous listening and processing that makes it feel responsive. We’re bringing Gemini Live to our most recent speakers and smart displays—devices with the microphone placement and processing power needed for fluid multi-turn conversations. That said, the baseline Gemini improvements (non-live features like better understanding, conversational context, and upgraded voices) will reach a much wider set of devices.

In addition to Live, we’ve put a lot of work into making Gemini sound better. We’re introducing 10 new voices with improved pacing, intonation, and expressiveness so responses feel less robotic and more like natural speech. These enhancements matter because voice is how many people experience the home AI.

📷 Multimodal camera intelligence: from alerts to understanding

Cameras have long been useful for security and monitoring, but they’ve also been noisy: too many low-context alerts clogging your feed. The next leap is semantic scene understanding—what I call the jump from smart cameras to AI cameras. Instead of “Person detected” or “Motion detected,” cameras will describe what’s actually happening in a human-friendly way: “USPS delivery person walked up to the porch and dropped a package off.”

This shift unlocks several big improvements:

Meaningful notifications: You’ll get alerts that tell you what happened, not just that something happened. That reduces the cognitive load of parsing notifications and scrolling through multiple events.
Ask Home and searchable history: You can ask natural language questions about past camera events—“Did the kids leave their bikes in the driveway?” or “Was there a skunk on the driveway last night?”—and Gemini will search days or hours of footage to find the answer.
Home Briefs: A summary view that summarizes hours or days of camera footage into short text summaries. If you don’t want to watch every clip, Home Briefs give you a quick digest of important activity.

These capabilities are built on Gemini’s multimodal models, which can integrate visual inputs with natural language. That’s a different approach than simple object detection: it’s about interpreting relationships, intent, and context. I’ve been using Ask Home internally and have already seen moments when it turned a long, tedious search into an instant answer. For example, when I noticed our driveway smelled odd after a trip, I asked the camera whether a skunk had been there. Gemini found the skunk’s appearance at 2 a.m. and gave me the answer in seconds—something that would have taken me ages to find by scrolling video manually.

Another real example from internal testing: my parents noticed something in their backyard at night. Using Ask Home, we discovered a family of raccoons living under the deck. That answer not only saved us hours of guesswork, it helped them take action before it became a bigger problem.

From flood of alerts to signal-rich summaries

One of the core user pain points has been that cameras generate a constant stream of low-context alerts: person detected, motion detected, package detected. That pushes the burden of deciding what matters onto the user. With semantic understanding, the burden shifts back to the system: the camera and Gemini decide what’s important and summarize or prioritize accordingly.

Example improvements you’ll see in the camera experience:

Zoomed-in event previews: Instead of showing a zoomed-out scene, the feed zooms into the exact area that triggered the event so you can quickly see the salient action.
Scrubby timeline and gestures: We brought over the beloved “Scrubby” feature from the Nest app so you can scrub through video quickly and fluidly using natural gestures.
Activity tab as a single source of truth: The activity tab in the new Home app now shows everything that happened across all devices—cameras, doorbells, sensors, and compatible third-party devices—so your home history is consolidated and searchable.

📱 The redesigned Google Home app: faster, simpler, and finally complete

One of the largest engineering efforts we’ve undertaken was consolidating Nest into the Home app. For years users asked for a one-app experience, and I’m happy to say we’re done with that migration. If you have Nest thermostats, cameras, locks, or other Nest devices, you can now migrate them to the Google Home app. No more app switching to manage different parts of your home.

But bringing everything into one app was only step one. We also rebuilt the app with three guiding principles:

Performance and reliability: The app now loads faster, crashes less, and performs more consistently—particularly for camera streaming and event playback. We shipped dozens of performance improvements in the months leading up to the release.
Simplicity: We reduced the app to three bottom tabs—Home, Activity, and Automations—so people can find what they need quickly without being overwhelmed.
Completeness: The Home app is now the single, canonical place to manage your entire smart home, including Nest devices created over the last decade.

Key app changes to look for:

New header with Ask Home: A persistent entry point across tabs for quick natural language queries and actions.
One-handed gestures and device navigation: Swipe between favorites, all devices, and dashboards like cameras, climate, Wi‑Fi, and energy—designed for one-handed use.
Improved camera experiences: Faster frame rates, scrubby timelines, zoomed event previews, double-tap to rewind or fast-forward, and faster streams.
Activity tab as the canonical timeline: Full home history across all devices, with Home Briefs summarizing critical events at the top.
Revamped automation editor: Natural language creation, clearer preview of what’s about to run, and an automation carousel that shows upcoming automations to all household members.

Why it took time to migrate Nest

People have rightly asked why the migration took so long. The short answer is that the Nest app and the Home app were built for very different scopes. The Nest app supported a small set of Nest devices with deeply integrated firmware and services. The Home app is built to support hundreds of millions of devices from thousands of OEMs in a single ecosystem. Migrating meant not only changing what you see in the front end, but moving long-lived back-end services, some dating back a decade, onto a single, modern architecture.

That required careful planning, massive backend migration work, and ensuring users wouldn’t lose any functionality. It was a significant engineering lift, but now that it’s complete, it unlocks so much more: unified automation, consistent camera features, and the ability to ship updates and improvements faster.

💳 Introducing Google Home Premium (replacing Nest Aware)

As part of this transition, we’re replacing Nest Aware with Google Home Premium: a subscription service designed for your whole home rather than a single device category. The product and tiers are familiar to current Nest Aware users—the price points and previous features remain in the new standard and advanced tiers—but we’ve added powerful Gemini-enabled features into both tiers.

Here’s how the tiers break down at a high level:

Google Home Premium Standard: Includes baseline Gemini enhancements for the home, access to Gemini Live (on supported hardware), natural language automation creation via Ask Home, and all the prior Nest Aware features you’d expect.
Google Home Premium Advanced: Builds on Standard and adds advanced Gemini features like Home Briefs (summaries of hours/days of footage), Ask Home’s ability to find specific moments in camera history, and other premium AI capabilities.

One important thing to note: if you’re a Google One subscriber with Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra, Google Home Premium is included at no extra cost. That means many Google One subscribers will automatically get Home Premium features without needing an additional subscription. For current Nest Aware subscribers, the features and price points you’re familiar with will carry forward into Home Premium.

Who needs Home Premium?

Out of the box, the baseline Gemini upgrades will be available on existing devices even without a subscription: better conversational context, upgraded voices, and some discovery improvements. Home Premium is the path to unlock the more advanced AI features—multimodal Ask Home searches, Home Briefs, and Gemini Live—especially if you want deeper camera intelligence, longer event history, and other premium services.

🔊 New hardware: Google Home speaker optimized for Gemini

We’re introducing a new flagship Google Home speaker built from the ground up for Gemini. We chose the product name intentionally: when people think of speakers and displays, they naturally think “Google Home.” So the new speaker carries that familiar naming and is part of our strategy to simplify the brand distinction between Home and Nest.

Why a new speaker when Gemini will be available on many existing devices? Two reasons:

Showcase a flagship experience: The new Google Home speaker is a showcase for what Gemini can achieve when hardware is optimized for the models. It includes custom on-device processing for better listening, noise suppression, echo cancellation, and microphone placement tuned for Gemini Live.
Provide choice: We want to offer both flagship devices and a broad ecosystem of partner devices. The new speaker is a premium offering that highlights Gemini’s capabilities, while existing devices and partner devices provide choice across price and form factor.

The speaker introduces a subtle but powerful visual change: a light ring around the base that communicates state—listening, processing, reasoning, or live conversation mode. That visual feedback helps build trust and makes interactions feel more transparent.

One more key point: if you pair two Google Home speakers with the Google TV streamer we released last year, you’ll be able to use them as cinema-quality surround speakers. That’s a feature users have been eagerly waiting for.

We’re bringing the speaker to market thoughtfully: Gemini for Home will roll out to existing users and devices in early access first. That gives us the chance to iterate and make sure the experience is rock solid. The new Google Home speaker itself will be available in spring 2026—timing that lets us refine Gemini on the fielded device base before launching the flagship product.

📸 New Nest cameras: 2K HDR, wider field of view, and optimized for AI

We refreshed our wired camera portfolio with the goal of creating AI cameras from the sensor up. That meant selecting sensors that provide the right detail for Gemini’s multimodal models without overwhelming home broadband. The result is 2K HDR across the lineup—our highest resolution yet—combined with wider fields of view, improved low-light performance, and a doorbell with a new 1:1 aspect ratio.

Key hardware improvements:

2K HDR resolution: Higher detail for clearer images, better facial recognition, and improved analysis by Gemini’s models.
Wider field of view: Outdoor cameras have over 150° FOV; doorbells jump to a dramatic 166° FOV to capture top-to-bottom and side-to-side views simultaneously.
1:1 doorbell aspect ratio: This balanced aspect ratio ensures you see a person’s whole body and packages on the doorstep without sacrificing context.
Improved low-light capture: Sensors let in 120% more light than previous generations, keeping the feed in color longer at dusk and dawn before switching to night vision.

All of these choices were made intentionally to support Gemini’s semantic scene understanding: the models need enough detail to interpret the scene accurately, but we also balanced bandwidth and storage so that the devices remain practical for real users. I’ll confess an anecdote here: during testing I hit my home data cap while traveling because I had many cameras uploading. It was an eye-opener about real-world constraints, and it shaped our decisions around resolution and upload behavior.

We’re proud of the image quality: each of the three new camera types—outdoor, indoor, and doorbell—was ranked number one by DXOMark in their respective categories for image quality. But image quality alone isn’t the point: pairing those images with Gemini’s understanding is what transforms the experience from “recording” to “interpreting.”

🛒 Partner devices and the Google Home platform expansion

While we build flagship Google and Nest models, we also know users want choice and value. That’s why we launched a camera partner program and announced Walmart as the first partner to ship affordable Google Home-compatible cameras. Those devices will integrate right in the Home app, support core camera features, and offer incredible value—an indoor camera around $22 and a doorbell in the $40s.

The aim is to broaden access to Gemini-enabled home experiences across price points. We’ll expand the partner program to more categories and partners over time, ensuring Gemini for Home isn’t limited to just Google-made hardware.

⚙️ Automations made easy with Ask Home

Automation used to be a realm for enthusiasts—people willing to learn conditions, triggers, and logic. We wanted to democratize automation so anyone can say what they want in plain language and have the system translate that into an automation. That’s what Ask Home and the revamped Automation editor deliver.

Example: my wife had never created an automation. During internal testing she simply said “make me feel safer” in Ask Home and started a dialog that ended with an automation being created that locks doors nightly and simulates presence when no one is home. She didn’t need to understand Boolean logic or set up triggers manually—she just expressed the outcome she cared about.

The automation tab itself has been redesigned to be more communal and informative. At the top of the tab there’s now a carousel that shows upcoming automations so any household member can glance in and see what’s about to happen—when blinds will close, when lights will dim, etc. That transparency matters in a shared living context where different family members may want to know why lights came on or doors locked.

Behind the scenes, we rebuilt the automation editor to be more powerful and expressive, letting Gemini parse natural language and propose automations with conditions, schedules, and device actions. It’s automation creation without the programming.

🔒 Privacy, reliability, and practical constraints

With more powerful AI in the home, privacy and reliability are top of mind. We approached the rollout with three priorities:

Transparency: Visual cues (like the Google Home speaker’s light ring) and clear UI indicators let you know when devices are listening, processing, or in live mode.
Choice and controls: Users can manage what’s stored, how long it’s stored, and whether camera events are used for AI features. Home Premium and Ask Home features are opt-in in many cases, and we provide controls around history and summaries.
Reliability: We intentionally designed a hybrid architecture that combines predictable device behaviors with the creative power of language models. For example, when you turn off lights or lock a door, you expect a deterministic outcome—Gemini respects and supports that, while offering richer conversational abilities for tasks where ambiguity is acceptable.

We also paid close attention to practical constraints like bandwidth and device processing. As mentioned earlier, higher resolution cameras mean more data, and real homes have constraints like ISP data caps. We balanced sensor choices to maximize utility while minimizing adverse impacts on user networks and storage.

Finally, the rollout strategy itself is a privacy and reliability play: we’re starting Gemini for Home in early access and iterating quickly based on real-world feedback. That lets us discover issues, improve robustness, and expand gradually to broader device classes.

📅 Rollout timeline and what to expect

Here’s the high-level rollout plan so you can know when to expect different parts of the experience:

October (early access): Gemini for Home early access begins, rolling out to existing speakers, smart displays, cameras, and doorbells from the last decade. The new Google Home app 4.0 begins rolling out globally on October 1st, bringing Nest device migration and app performance improvements.
Ongoing updates: After the initial rollout, you’ll see frequent app and feature updates. Performance is a journey, and we’ve committed to releasing improvements every few weeks or months as we iterate on user feedback.
Google Home Premium: Replaces Nest Aware and will be available in two tiers—Standard and Advanced. Google One subscribers with AI Pro or AI Ultra will receive Home Premium features without an additional subscription cost.
Spring 2026: The new flagship Google Home speaker ships, optimized for Gemini and Gemini Live.
Partner devices: Walmart’s Google Home-compatible camera and doorbell will be available in the U.S. first, expanding the ecosystem with value options that integrate into the Home app.

Because this is an iterative, measured rollout, you’ll see features land in phases. Gemini’s core conversational improvements will be broadly available on existing devices; Gemini Live and the most compute-intensive features will arrive on newer, compatible hardware first.

🔎 A closer look at assistant vs Gemini for home

It’s worth stepping back for a moment to compare the classic Assistant and Gemini for Home. Assistant introduced many households to voice interaction and did a lot of things well: timers, media control, calendar integration, and deterministic smart home commands. But it showed its limitations when users expected a deeper conversational partner or more human-like understanding.

Here’s how I think about the evolution:

Assistant (previous generation): Great at predictable commands and direct queries. Deterministic, low-latency, and reliable for explicit tasks. Less adept at conversational follow-up, fuzzy memory, and multimodal understanding.
Gemini for Home (this generation): Combines the predictability users expect for fundamental actions with the creativity and contextual understanding of large language and multimodal models. It remembers conversational context, asks clarifying questions, interprets camera scenes, and can create automations from plain language.

The migration to Gemini wasn’t simply swapping models; it required re-architecting the ways commands are processed so that the home remains predictable for critical actions while enabling richer, more natural interactions for everything else.

🌱 Home 2.0: why this is the first chapter of a new book

I often describe this milestone internally as Home 2.0. If the last decade was our first book—introducing voice control, smart devices, and a basic smart home—this feels like the first chapter of the second book. Gemini unlocks imagination and practical progress at the same time. It lets us finally deliver on the vision many of us have had for years: a home that feels conversational, understands scenes instead of just motion, and helps all members of the household without forcing them to be “power users.”

That’s why I say we’re not at the finish line. This early access release and the new hardware are major milestones, but they are just the start. As we collect feedback, iterate on privacy choices, improve performance, and expand partner integrations, the Home ecosystem will only get richer.

What I find most gratifying is seeing real people—my colleagues, family, and early testers—discover new things they didn’t expect. When my wife created her first automation by speaking casually into Ask Home, that was a vivid sign we were making the system more accessible to everyone. When my parents discovered a raccoon family in their backyard via Ask Home, it showed how AI cameras can translate curiosity into actionable information. Those are the moments that make all the engineering and design work worth it.

📣 Final thoughts and how to get started

If you’re running a Google Home or Nest device today, here’s how I recommend getting started as we roll this out:

Update the Google Home app: Keep an eye for the 4.0 rollout starting October 1. Update when prompted so you get the latest performance and feature improvements.
Look for early access invites: We’ll be rolling Gemini for Home to devices in phases. If you receive an early access invitation, try it and tell us what works and what doesn’t—your feedback will shape the next iterations.
Explore Ask Home: Try natural language queries about your camera history or everyday automations. Start with simple prompts (“Make me feel safer while I’m traveling” or “Did someone leave a bike in the driveway?”) and build from there.
Consider Home Premium: If you want advanced camera summarization and long-term history search, Home Premium Advanced unlocks those features. If you’re a Google One AI Pro/Ultra subscriber, you may already have access without extra cost—check your subscription settings.
Think about hardware needs: Gemini Live will require newer devices for the most fluid, continuous-chat experiences. If you’re interested in a flagship experience, the new Google Home speaker arrives in spring 2026; in the meantime, many Gemini improvements will appear on your existing hardware.

I’m excited about this chapter and I’m grateful to everyone in our early access program, our partner ecosystem, and the teams who built this across software, hardware, and AI models. The smart home has often been promised but underdelivered; with Gemini for Home, the promise finally starts to feel real. We’re just getting started, and I can’t wait to see how people use these capabilities in ways we haven’t even imagined yet.

"If the last decade was sort of the first book of our saga, then this moment in time is just the first chapter of that next book." — Anish Kadukara

If you want to hear the original conversation in full, look up the Made by Google podcast episode where I speak with Rashid Finch. And if you try early access or any of the new Home app features, please let us know—your feedback is the most important input as we iterate toward the future of the smart home.

Thank you for reading. I’m Anish Kadukara, and I can’t wait to bring more of Gemini’s potential into your home.