Hey r/googlehome!

Here are the latest updates from Google Home posted today 5/11 on g.co/home/notes

Gemini for Home: voice assistant (early access)

Quick & Simple Feedback on Smart Displays
Your feedback is critical to helping us make Gemini for Home even better for you. We're introducing a new faster way to give feedback on Gemini for Home on smart displays. Following most voice interactions, thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons will appear. Simply tap thumbs up if you're satisfied or thumbs down if you're dissatisfied. This will help us zero in on what we need to improve next. Thank you and keep the feedback coming. 

Smarter, Faster Smart Home

We’ve improved how Gemini interacts with your smart home devices, focusing on both deeper personalization and faster response times. Gemini can now leverage information you saved in Ask Home, when asking questions about camera history, as you speak to it on your smart speakers and displays. It uses explicit information that you chose to save about family members or frequent visitors, such as “our nanny’s name is Alice” to intelligently resolve camera search queries for a more seamless experience. For example, Gemini may search for a familiar face tagged as Alice if you ask if your nanny arrived. 

You can also get a quick recap of what happened at home while you were away by asking for your "Home Brief" on your speaker or display. At the same time, we've optimized backend processing for device commands, making actions like turning on lights noticeably faster and more responsive.
Try saying:

• "When did the nanny come home?"
• "Where is my wife's car?"
• "Give me my Home Brief for the day"
• "Turn on the living room lights"

Faster Alarms & Timers

Setting your daily alarms and timers should now be noticeably quicker. We’ve streamlined how queries and commands are processed so Gemini responds much faster, reducing wait times and the need to repeat yourself while improving overall reliability.
Try saying:

• "Set a 10 minute timer"
• "Set an alarm for 7 AM"

Expanded Access for Answers

We’ve updated our safeguards to provide more helpful content for adult users. While we maintain strict protections to prevent age-inappropriate content for younger users, adults will now experience improved availability for general queries, including recipes for age-gated beverages.
Try saying:

• "Give me the recipe to make a margarita"

If Gemini for Home is not responding to your requests appropriately, please be sure to check both your Parental Controls & Digital Wellbeing settings and your Gemini for Home response filter settings in the Google Home app.

Improved Onboarding Discovery

Gemini is now better at helping you find new ways to use it. When you ask Gemini for help getting started, it now reliably responds with clear suggestions tailored to your needs, helping you discover new ways to interact.
Try saying:

• "What can you do?"

Google Home App

These features and improvements are available in Google Home App version 4.16, and are beginning to roll out today.

App Features & Improvements

Energy

Nest Thermostats

• One-tap temperature overrides: You can now instantly pause the use of outdoor temperatures to heat or cool your home directly from your thermostat controller. This gives you immediate flexibility to adjust your home’s temperature on the fly without changing your long-term automatic settings.
• Up-to-date schedule advice: Thermostat schedule banners now always include the most relevant information, guaranteeing that the recommendations and schedules displayed are always timely and tailored to your current environment.

Works with Google Home Thermostats

• More controls for non-Nest thermostat on iOS: On iOS, you can now seamlessly manage compatible third-party thermostats and air conditioners directly from the Google Home app, just like on Android.

Device Setup

New Device Setup Experience
Setting up new smart home devices is now simpler with the new QR code discovery flow. We have replaced the previous multi-option setup menu with a convenient QR code scanner that guides you to the correct setup path for your device. This streamlined experience removes the guesswork (Is this a ‘Matter-enabled device’ or a ‘Works with Google Home’ device or a ‘Google Nest’ device) from adding new products, helping you get them connected with greater ease and confidence.

Hey r/googlehome!

We're excited to show you some new features we’ve been working on to make your Google Home experience even easier, faster, and more accessible.

We are always working behind the scenes to improve your Google Home experience and help your day run smoothly. This May update brings an overhauled camera experience and a smarter home experience. Let's jump right in!

Faster, smoother, and a modernized camera experience in the Google Home app

We know how important the camera experience is, and we have a massive update to share! We’ve modernized the Google Home camera experience with significant performance improvements, a refreshed UI, and expanded certain popular features to earlier-generation cameras.

This major update modernizes and upgrades the camera experience within the Google Home app:

• Refreshed UI
• Faster navigation
• Smoother video scrubbing
• Redesigned event details page
• Alerts with zoomed-in previews

These are just the highlights, check out this blog post for a full breakdown of what’s new with cameras!

Gemini for Home voice assistant: intelligence upgrade to Gemini 3.1

We're excited to upgrade Gemini for Home users in early access to Gemini 3.1—our most advanced model yet—for smarter and more capable performance that saves you time and helps you get more done. Gemini 3.1 features advanced reasoning to better interpret and execute complex, multi-step voice commands.  You can now combine different tasks, such as adding new items and updating existing lists in one breath; in the past, this would have required multiple separate commands. Setting alarms and reminders, managing your calendar, and controlling your smart home can now handle more complex requests at the outset.

Gemini 3.1 has been fully rolled out to all users enrolled in early access. Please let us know how it's working for you. Read more about the Gemini 3.1 upgrade in our release notes.

More robust automations

We’re introducing new automation capabilities so you can enjoy greater peace of mind and convenience, from managing robot vacuums and kitchen appliances to checking battery levels and door locks.

Read more about our expanded automations traits in this blog post.

Manage your home easier, and faster

Managing your home should be easy and seamless, whether you're watching TV, on your phone, or even away from your home. This update brings more powerful ways to control and view your home across multiple surfaces:

• Access Ask Home on Web (coming soon to Public Preview): You will be able to easily search your camera history, check on your devices, and create home automations directly from your computer.
• Improved and expanded notifications (Public Preview only): Use "Quick Action" buttons in your notifications for instant device control. If you manage multiple properties, the Google Home app automatically switches to the right home—no extra clicks required.

Learn more about how to join Public Preview for Google Home here and be the first to try new features

With these new updates, personalizing your smart home and controlling it from anywhere is super-easy. Share your experiences, tips, and tricks in the Nest Community Forums.

Thanks,

Google Home & Nest Team

Hey r/googlehome!

Here are the latest updates from Google Home posted today 4/28 on g.co/home/notes

 

Gemini for Home: Voice Assistant (Early access)

Faster Control

We’ve streamlined how we recognize device commands for faster response times. These speed upgrades are now available for English, French, and Spanish users in supported countries with support in more languages coming soon.

• Snappier Smart Home: By optimizing how we process device commands and home layouts, you may notice a significant speed boost—up to 1.5 seconds—when controlling your lights or plugs.
• Get organized, faster: We’ve made alarm, timer, and reminder commands more responsive. Basic commands like checking or setting timers now have more efficient processing.

For a snappier response, try saying:

• "Turn on the kitchen lights."
• "Set a timer for 10 minutes."
• "Cancel my pizza timer."

Home Intelligence Reliability

We’ve refined how your assistant interprets the context of your home and your conversations to reduce errors and interruptions.

• Contextual Logic: Gemini is now better at identifying when a request is a standalone command versus a follow-up, which helps reduce unnecessary questions. Based on context, Gemini can determine when to ignore irrelevant speech, which is also helpful for users who activate Continued Conversation.
• Consistent Routines: We’ve refined how the system handles your custom Routines to help them run as expected without interference from other smart home commands.

Try saying:

• “Hey Google, I’m home.” (triggers your “I’m home” routine)
• “Hey Google, set a timer for 10 minutes… and turn off the fan.”
• “Hey Google, what’s the weather?” → “How about in Seattle?”

Google Home App

App Features & Improvements

Camera

• Updated Camera Experience is starting to roll out: We’ve modernized the camera user experience with dynamic theming and made key features more easily accessible and discoverable. For Advanced plan subscribers of Google Home Premium, your timeline now includes AI descriptions, making it easier and more enjoyable to scroll through your history and identify interesting moments.
• Clearer Event Descriptions: We've refined our camera AI descriptions to remove unnecessary clutter, making them more accurate and easier to read at a glance.
• Faster Search: Finding what you're looking for is now quicker, with camera search results loading noticeably faster in Ask Home.
• Simplified Camera Settings: Now your camera settings are much easier to find. We’ve elevated useful features such as Gemini for Home, familiar face detection and Activity Zones. Activity Zones are now much faster to configure and update. Seen and heard events are now combined into a single page, streamlining event recording and notification configuration.

 

Smart Home

• Take the guesswork out of 'offline' devices. We’ve added instant account-relinking prompts to the device controller pages in the app, so you’ll know when an expired partner link is the culprit—and how to fix it with a single tap.

Media & Casting

• Media Device Control: Our new media control experience when using Google Home app to cast music and videos to your Google smart speakers, smart displays, Google TV Streamer and other Cast devices is now available to all users. Putting your favourite artists' beautiful album artwork front and center and giving you better access to playback controls and device management.

   

Feedback

• Enhanced Diagnostics: Diagnostic information included in feedback reports is now more detailed, helping us fix issues faster when you send feedback through the app.

Google Home Platform

• Google Home Vitals: Frustrating "offline" messages or slow response times are often caused by hidden connection errors. To address the root causes of device lag and unreliability, we are equipping partners with Google Home Vitals, a new quality initiative. A dedicated webpage now enables developers to monitor their device integration health, identify connection errors, and proactively resolve issues. As partners adopt these new tools, you can look forward to a future where your lights, locks, and cameras respond faster and more reliably stay connected—ensuring your home works exactly how you expect it to across the Google Home app and Gemini for Home.

Google Home Premium

Account Hold: It’s easy to forget to update your credit cards if one is expiring, or you’ve switched to a new card, or your card needs to be replaced for various reasons. With account hold, your Google Home Premium subscription will be temporarily paused rather than ending if there are payment issues, helping ensure you don’t lose your video history, familiar faces, or AI event descriptions.