Gemini-powered experiences for the Google Home smart home platform: a voice-over-eye view and privacy-preserving features for smart speakers and displays

Ahead of its fall hardware event next week, Google announced three new Gemini intelligence-powered experiences it plans to bring to its Google Home smart home platform later this year. There is a new camera intelligence feature that will give a description of the footage from the cameras, as well as natural language input for creating routines and a smart Google Assistant for smart speakers and displays with a voice.

The new voice will be free, but other features like video recordings and the subscription to the Nest camera service will cost you more. The features will be rolled out to a larger group of users in the next year or two, initially for a select group of subscribers.

The news that will be positive for long-suffering Google Home users is that they’ll be able to keep seeing features they rely on. They were struggling through a laborious transition from the Nest app to the Home app.

Kattukaran says the new Google Assistant will be able to maintain the context of your conversation and start to learn and understand your home. The Gemini-powered capabilities will run “in the cloud, for your home” in accordance with Google’s privacy principles, he says.

Google is set to supercharge Google Home with Gemini intelligence ai-google-homenest-aware (via the Verge)

A young person in casual clothes is standing next to an SUV. They are carrying things. The car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful.

The caption provides context, which is helpful and could translate to smarter home automation. For example, if a camera detects an animal and understands that “the dog is digging in the garden,” the next step could be to create an automation to “turn on the sprinklers.”

Text will be a option for searching through footage in the Home activity tab. This could be handy if my cat sneaks out after dark. I could ask it to show me the last time it spotted the cat rather than having to scroll through every video tagged with an animal to find him.

It’s possible to tell the ‘Help me create’ feature in the Google Home app what you would like it to do, and it will create a routine to do it automatically.

You need to use the text or speech input in the Home app on your phone (it doesn’t work through Nest speakers), but Kattukaran says it will have all the current capabilities of the Google Home app. This includes all the current starters, conditions, and actions, plus access to any device connected to Google Home, including Matter devices. He thinks it should make creating automations easy for anyone, even though it is not as sophisticated as the script editor at Google.

New voices with different styles, tones and accents are being added to the Google assistant. The company released a demo of the first new voice engaging in some conversational back and forth. It sounds more natural and lighter than the female version, as you can hear in the video.

It is thought that Google Assistant should communicate more naturally and sound more natural. It can handle pauses, ums and ahs, and answer follow up questions if it is given the chance, according to Kattukaran. I didn’t see an in-person demo of this, but it sounds similar to the features Amazon announced for Alexa last fall (that have yet to arrive).

Source: Google is set to supercharge Google Home with Gemini intelligence

Google TV Streamer: A $99.99 Set-Top Box with HDMI 2.1, USB-C, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 5.1

It is for your home and data models. We’re being very intentional about going slow. In the home, the margin for error is very low; we can’t mess up,” he says. The goal is for the models to build an understanding of your home — such as the rooms and devices you have — and then build on that baseline to get smarter over time.

The Jetsons was the vision when we began with the first-gen assistant and he could help you figure it out. “We made a bunch of progress, then it plateaued — across all the assistants, not just us. We hit a technological ceiling. That’s been raised with LLMs and language models that are more multi-modal.”

The next generation of the Chromecast will not be announced at the upcoming hardware event. Alongside the new, sleeker Nest Thermostat, today, the company is introducing the Google TV Streamer, a $99.99 set-top box that improves upon the Chromecast with Google TV with substantially better performance, Thread and Matter integration, and useful new features like a remote finder.

On the back of the Streamer are several ports where you can connect cables for Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, and USB-C for power. A gentle curve on the back of the device blocks any wires from sight. The audible ping on the remote is caused by the button that was pressed to help you find it. It probably is between the couch cushions. The remote is the same as the one included in the previous generation of Chromecast with Google TV. Some buttons have moved to be more ergonomic; volume, for example, is now on the front rather than the edge of the remote. Also new is a customizable button that can open your favorite app or Google’s Home Panel.

Hopefully, those changes will be enough to make the Google TV user experience much smoother and prevent the Streamer from getting bogged down over time. Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos are both present like before, and you can still cast content to the Google TV Streamer as always. The Chromecast name might be gone, but the functionality isn’t. This also has to be among the first streaming devices to be powered over USB-C. Other tech specs include HDMI 2.1a, Wi-Fi 5, gigabit ethernet, and Bluetooth 5.1.

The device comes in two colors, one of which is exclusive to the Google Store. Unlike the Chromecast, which could be hidden away behind your TV, the Google TV Streamer is designed to sit underneath it and be seen — without standing out from your other home decor. Part of why Google designed it to be placed out in the open is because the device includes a Thread border router and connectivity support for Matter.

Both devices have a bit of artificial intelligence spruced in—Google Assistant is getting some assistance from the company’s Gemini large language model—along with long-awaited hardware improvements, and elegant designs that better blend the tech into your home. The company is holding an event on August 13 called “Made by Google”, where it’s likely to announce new products.

Nine years have passed since Google introduced the third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat, but the wait for the fourth-generation model is finally over. The company introduced its new smart thermostat. It arrives on the same day as a next-gen version of Google’s iconic Chromecast streaming dongle—now called the Google TV Streamer.