If you’re in the Google Home ecosystem, you’ve more than likely been eagerly awaiting the company’s Next Big Thing—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 one—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.
Some of the new Gemini stuff does work
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 caveat—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 Goveeand 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.
Is Gemini the assistant you’ve been waiting for?
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.
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