Gemini for Home arrives on Nest devices with promise and frustration in equal measure

Gemini Didn't Make My Old Nest Mini Smart Speaker Feel Any Less Dumb

If you're in the Google Home ecosystem, you've more than likely been eagerly awaiting the company's Next Big Thingâ€"Gemini for Home. As I've covered previously, Gemini for Home offers some major updates, but more than anything, it promises the experience we thought we were going to get a decade ago: a more frictionless way to shout at the army of cheap smart home devices that dutifully control our living spaces. While Google announced Gemini for Home back in September, its rollout has been a slow oneâ€"so slow, in fact, that people have resorted to trying to hack their smart speakers into switching. I can't say I blame them, either. I, too, have been deeply curious about what benefits Gemini for Home can bring to my smart home experience and whether or not it can actually do stuff like... turn off all of my lights except for one. Turns out that today is the day that curiosity is sated. At long last, it appears my waiting is done; I have Gemini for Home (the free version) on my old-ass Google Home Mini speaker, and I've got both good and bad news about the future of voice computing. While the free version of Gemini for Home (what most people will be using) doesn't have all of the Gemini potential, it does have a few perks that might intrigue users lodged deep in Google's smart home ecosystem. One of the promises that Google makes is that you can use more specific commands. One that jumped out to me is that you can turn off all the smart lights in your home except the specified ones. Believe it or not, this isn't something that regular old Google Assistant was capable of doing. I tried it for myself, and it worked... kind of. While Gemini for Home can recognize that I've singled out one light in my home while turning off the rest, other bad habits die hard. One thing it still doesn't do is properly understand that when I say "lights," I mean all of my lights, not just the ones in my bedroom. This means I can't just say, "Turn off all the lights except the living room lamp." Instead, I have to say, "Turn off all the lights in my household except the living room lamp." It's a small difference, but an annoying one over time. With the natural language capabilities of Gemini, I would have expected that to be cleaned up, and for anyone who cordons off their lights and other gadgets into specific rooms so they can turn off sections of their home, this would have been an easy area to improve on. One thing that Gemini for Home can also do in the light department is change the color of lights. Using my voice, I turned my living room lights blue. Nice! Well, sort of... If you're like most people, you probably don't always want to vibe out with blue lights. You're going to want a normal time sooner rather than later, and to make that happen, you'll have to change your lights back. Knowing that Gemini for Home is supposed to have more context about the things you've recently asked, I shouted at my Google Home Mini to "Undo the last action," however, that didn't work. I was told that Gemini can't do that. So, instead, I resorted to "change the lights to white," which technically worked, but with another caveatâ€"I don't keep my lights set to white. I, like many others, I'm sure, don't like to live my life awash in a sterile Severance-style sea of fluorescent lighting, so I change my lights to a warmer, more yellowish color. Describing that color to Gemini for Home is easier said than done, though, so to change the color of my lights back, I had to pull open the first-party app for the Govee and Wyze lights on my phone and change them manually. Didn't exactly feel like the future. Overall, the whole context thing seems to be lacking. When I asked Gemini what its new capabilities were, it obliged, giving me what I discovered was just a word-for-word readout of the same AI Overview you'd get from a regular Google search. I wanted more, though, so when Gemini was done with its spiel, I asked, "Can you be more specific?" Instead of specifying features, however, it decided to launch me into a voice note. Not exactly what I had in mind. Likewise, when I tried to add an event (a family dinner) to my calendar by following up with "Can you add that event to my calendar?" Gemini seemed to get confused and tried to make a whole new event. It appears some long-standing glitches still exist, too, like the fact that you can't remove time from a timer. I set a timer for one minute and then asked Gemini to remove 30 seconds. Gemini said it would do that, thought for a second, and then told me that "something went wrong," just like the Google Assistant of yore would. Some things about Gemini for Home do seem to be a little more sophisticated. Changing light colors and also more specified, multi-step commands seem to work for the most part. That being said, there are still quite a few pitfalls and caveats that prevent Gemini from feeling as smart as it should. Context is still hit and miss, and Google doesn't seem to have cleansed its voice assistant of annoying bugs that plagued Google Assistant. It's worth noting that there are also paid versions ($10 for standard and $20 per month for the advanced plan) that I did not test. Those allow you to set more sophisticated automations and do other stuff, like ask Gemini about specific things your security camera saw. I can't speak to how those work, but if they're anything like what I used, I'm not sure they justify the monthly subscription. For what it's worth, our smart home guru Wes Davis reviewed the Nest Doorbell Cam (wired, 3rd gen) and Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen) and was not impressed by Gemini's hallucinations. The fact of the matter is that all of this is a lot harder than it seems. Not only does Google Home need to communicate with hundreds of different devices not made by Google (a tall order in its defense), but the entire idea of a smarter voice assistant could be a bit of a pipe dream to begin with. While AI chatbots like ChatGPT that have been trained on large language models are good at understanding natural language, they're actually not great at executing simple commands. Sometimes they just think too much, which is not what you want when you're turning your lights on and off. For that reason, Google is tasked with properly dosing out Gemini into its voice assistant, giving it a little bit of a brain upgrade, but not overdoing it. The result is, well... kind of what I just laid out: a Gemini-powered assistant that does a bit more, but not enough to justify calling it a game-changer. For now, Gemini for Home feels like a work in progress, much like the last generation.

Gemini finally made the Nest Hub worth keeping in my house

While I've been a firm believer in the Google Home ecosystem for quite a while, I would be lying if I wasn't at least a little jealous of the folks who have had Alexa + roll out onto their devices recently. Taking Alexa from one of the worst to easily the best home assistants, my Nest Hub has been falling behind for quite some time. Sure, it was great for little things here and there, but seeing all the new Alexa + features had me considering making the switch to the Dark Side. Now that Gemini has hit my Nest Hub, I can take a bit of a breath and relax. There's a lot of extraordinarily good stuff here, and I'm glad that Google is finally making the jump into the next generation with Gemini. However, as with any new software, be prepared to navigate some initial challenges. Chaining commands is an amazing feature Finally, I can ask for more than one task at a time One of the most annoying aspects of owning a smart home hub was having to ask it to perform more than one task. Typically, I have to ask my Google Assistant to do tasks one at a time, waiting a moment between each to get them done. Now with Google Gemini, I can chain commands together and watch them run quickly and efficiently. Seeing as I have my Nest Hub hanging from a cabinet in the kitchen, this can be incredibly helpful as I bark orders while making something for dinner. The more I can get done in one fell swoop, the happier I am, and Gemini can make that happen without blinking a virtual eye. Related Gemini isn't as useless as it was when you tried it two years ago AI that I first despised is now my Google Assistant replacement. Posts By Keval Shukla Google Keep integration is surprisingly handy Instantly getting my notes on my phone is a blessing I've found that Google Keep is the perfect way for me to keep all of my thoughts centralized in one place. Being able to access them on my PC, my phone, and anywhere else that happens to have an internet connection is a blessing. Now, I can quickly yell something at my Nest Hub, and it will sync this note across all platforms. I used to have fun creating shopping lists and doing things like that, but now? I can actually take some proper notes and check them wherever I'd like. Yes, I can still take down shopping lists and things like that, but I can also use this for more in-depth notes. I've been getting a lot more creative in the kitchen lately, and I can note things like how something fried or baked, and what I can try to do differently next time. I can even name it and ask Gemini to let me add it to the note, all hands-free while I'm working a few feet away. It's still my favorite smart home controller Gemini just makes things work better overall One of the nicest parts of the Nest Hub is having all of my smart home controls in one central location. No matter if I want to control my Android TV stick that I used on my aging smart TV, or if I need to brighten the house up during the winter months, everything I need is right at my fingertips. It's incredibly user-friendly, both for voice recognition and touch. Pair that with a genuinely great speaker, and I've got the ultimate way to engross myself in the kitchen, or any other room in the house that I may move this to in the future. If I want to check my Wyze cameras to see what's going on outside or switch to a different show on the living room TV, simple on-screen prompts or excellent voice recognition can make it happen quickly. Gemini on Nest Hub lacks generative AI features Most people may see this as a victory, however One of the biggest draws for some folks using Alexa + is the ability to create images with AI. Even though Google is going all in on AI-powered search results and image generation via Nano Banana, you can't use your Nest Hub to create AI photos. While this isn't a feature that I would really be using in any particular situation, some folks may be disheartened to learn that Gemini on Hub can't do this. Maybe it'll be added in as a feature in the future, seeing as Gemini on Hub is in its early stages. Powered by a modified version of Flash 2.5, Gemini has enough smarts to make things like this happen, but it may be just a little too early to expect the little Hub that could to do something as complex as generate an image and display it. I mean, it would be nice if it could turn a recipe into a nice little infographic like it can on the web, but we can only ask for so much right now. All in all, Gemini is a great new addition It can only get better from here As Google Gemini slowly gets rolled out to more devices in the future, I can't wait to see how things continue to grow and advance from here. Google Assistant has slowly become more obtuse and frustrating over the years, and Gemini has already impressed me over the past week or so that I've had it on here. With consistent updates, I can see Gemini becoming far more useful than Google Assistant ever was on this device, and I'm glad that I've had the chance to upgrade it. It made my Nest Hub feel like a whole new piece of equipment, and I'm eager to see what other changes Google has in store for me over the next few updates. Nest Hub Smart Display Brand Nest Display 7" Touchscreen SMART ASSISTANTS Gemini $100 at Best Buy Expand Collapse