Google Home's biggest sell is convincing users that Gemini is worth paying for.
How did this week become a declaration of the smart home that wouldn't quit? I wanted to pay attention to the news (apparently the government shut down?), but between Amazon's announcements (ignoring the Kindle stuff for a second) and Google's reveal of what's changing in the Google Home ecosystem, I'm feeling pressed to get my actual smart home up to speed before doing anything else. It's a mess right now.
It'll be a while before we see what Google's vision for the smart home is like with Gemini running the show. It is being rolled out very slowly to early adopters, who are expected to provide feedback on what to improve going forward as the team overhauls it. The bulk of the work is taken care of, as you'll discover in our upcoming interview with Google Home's Product Manager, Anish Kattukaran, publishing soon on the Android Faithful feed. However, there's still work to be done in terms of iterating and smoothing out the rough spots.
Most of what's going to change in your Google-led smart home is Gemini. It promises to be more conversational, more accurate, and easier to deal with as a passive user. But its best features will exist behind a paywall. Nest Aware is no longer a cloud storage subscription for Google's security cameras. It's been converted to Google Home Premium, a subscription that unlocks two tiers of generative features. These features include the Ask Home function, which allows you to ask Gemini to help you set up automations and other tasks, and Home Brief, which summarizes the day's notifications.
If you were already paying for Nest Aware, this won't be a significant change to your budget, although it may alter your relationship with the Google-led smart home. With most of Google Home's basic automation functionality being free and offering up to three hours of Nest event video history, paying means taking a leap of faith on artificial intelligence. There's no way to tell if it will be worth it yet—all we have to go by is Google's insistence that it has been listening and taking in feedback from the last decade. But if this does work out and we, the users, are satisfied with the product, it will be major validation for all that Google has pushed aside to prioritize AI.
It's me, Ron, and Mishaal! We discussed what Xiaomi's showcasing overseas and why F-Droid's latest screed has us worried about the open future of Android.
