is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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This weekend, I turned my home into a test lab for Google’s new Gemini for Home AI and subjected my family to 72 hours of surveillance as it watched, interpreted, and narrated our every move. My purpose? To find out if an AI that sees everything is actually helpful or just plain creepy.
“R unpacking items from a box,” read one notification from the Nest camera on a shelf in the kitchen. “Jenni cuts a pie / B walks into the kitchen, washes dishes in the sink / Jenni gets a drink from the refrigerator,” it continued. Sometimes, the alerts sounded like the start of a joke, “A dog, a person, and two cats walk into the room / Two chickens walk across the patio.”
But these weren’t jokes. They were mostly accurate descriptions of the goings-on in and around my home, where I’d installed several Google Nest cameras powered by Gemini for Home. This is a new AI layer in the Google Home app that interprets footage from the cameras and — combined with Nest’s facial recognition feature — delivers a written description of the events, including who or what is present, what they are doing, and sometimes even what they’re wearing.
For example, now, instead of alerts saying “animal detected on the porch,” I get more descriptive versions telling me that it’s two chickens or one dog. One of those requires immediate action on my part (my husband is not a fan of chickens pooping on our outdoor couch). The other I can ignore. Alerts like the one from the Nest Doorbell at 1AM, which clarifies it’s my son at the front door trying to get in, are less anxiety-inducing than one that just says “person detected.”
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