Gemini for Google Home has arrived and, with it, a glimpse of Google’s view of the future of the smart home. But that future is still held back by the simple fact that, like anything with AI, it makes too many mistakes.
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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had Gemini for Home active with my Google Nest devices and my feelings are pretty split. On the one hand, Gemini adds a lot of impressive new functionality to the experience.
Starting with “Ask Home,” the ability to just search for a thing that happened instead of combing through footage is awesome. Being able to know my camera was watching and ask “where is my laptop” only to get a response is just… well, it’s the future, isn’t it?
Of course, search is just one piece of that puzzle, and it’s built in part on Gemini’s ability to see a Nest Cam feed and intelligently label the event with what it saw. Again, super useful! Frankly, it’s a little crazy this isn’t how the smart home has always worked. Truly, it’s just invaluable, because previously, your only indication regarding what the camera saw was basically “here’s this person” or “hey look, a dog” or “well, something definitely moved,” meaning the task of figuring out when an event happened fell on you. Looking back, generic notifications just weren’t enough.
The three pillars of Gemini for Home are truly brilliant ideas
This also leads to the third big piece of Gemini for Home, which is “Home Brief,” a daily summary of your Nest Cam recordings.The idea here is to give you a quick overview of what happened over the course of the day, rather than just relying on you constantly watching your notification feed. Neat!
But, it doesn’t always work.
Each of these three pillars of the new Gemini-enhanced Google Home experience has its own set of issues, and they take away from what is otherwise an incredibly smart way to treat the smart home.
Starting with notification labels, this succumbs to the same trap that every AI product faces – absurd overconfidence.
Gemini’s summaries of what happened in a given piece of Nest footage are sometimes accurate, but sometimes make Google Home look like a fool. For every “Ben is in the kitchen cooking chicken” – yes, it managed to correctly recognize chicken – there’s a “Ben loads a bicycle into the car” when, in fact, I did not. It’s usually minor stuff like this. Mislabeling an object that’s not quite sure what to do with. For instance, the “bicycle” I took out of the car was actually a disc golf cart (which looks nothing like a bike), and I didn’t actually take it out of the car in the clip that was labeled. There was another instance where my wife took the trash outside, but Gemini labeled that as her placing a package on the porch. For some reason, Gemini also can’t decide if my car is blue, which it is, or gray, which it is not even close to. I’ll certainly give it credit for accurately being able to tell the right make and model of both of our cars, though. Similarly, it also sometimes identifies the same event in different ways. While using a leaf blower in the backyard, Gemini changed its mind halfway through and said I was using a rake instead.
The mistakes are usually minor stuff, but enough to make you do a double-take. That said, there are examples out there of… worse failures.
For every time Gemini gets something right, it also tends to make a weird mistake that makes you do a double-take
The Verge noted earlier this week that Gemini was unable to recognize the homeowner walking by their camera with a shotgun, instead calling it a “garden tool,” and also wouldn’t label a knife in the summary. I’ve also noticed that Gemini tends to be pretty non-descript around objects it’s not sure about, but with these being security cameras, knives and guns are pretty high on the list of objects I want it to be able to properly identify!
These same issues bleed over to “Home Brief.” The summaries are a useful way to get a quick overview, but they are too confident about what they’re trying to say. I also feel like this feature is too eager to make a long list. “Ben sat on the couch” really provides no value in one of these summaries in my book. “Ask Home” only has one headache so far, at least to me, which is that it’s kind of slow. Again, the feature is generally way faster than scouring through the footage yourself, but it’s just slow enough to respond to your query that it can be frustrating. I definitely don’t need it to be instant, but waiting 15-25 seconds while it “thinks” feels like a bit of wasted time.
So, what’s next?
Well, Google Home’s Gemini features are, for now, all in beta anyway. This is the “Early Access” period where things are not reflective of the final product and, with that in mind, we’re seeing a rather good foundation. There’s a lot of room for improvement, definitely, but also a lot of great ideas already at play.
That said, I’m not sure we’ll ever fully be rid of this missteps, at least in this current step for AI. The biggest problem with Gemini for Home is also the reason why these features are possible in the first place. AI is powerful, but it’s still overconfident and prone to mistakes that, well, look stupid! That’s why I’m glad Google’s setup here is opt-in, as you won’t get most of these features without explicitly signing up for them.
What do you think? Have you been using Gemini for Home?
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