GoKawiilis 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.
Google is opening up its smart home to AI agents, letting tools like Claude and Open Claw access and control your connected devices and analyze your home’s data using the standardized Model Context Protocol.
Google Home MCP is a new integration that lets third-party AI agents control and monitor your smart home and act on your behalf. It “allows any AI agents that support MCP, including Google Antigravity, Claude, Hermes or Open Claw, to securely work with all of the devices and event history in your Google Home ecosystem,” Taylor Lehman, group product manager at Google Home & Nest, said in a blog post.
According to Lehman, Home MCP integration will connect your AI agent of choice to real-world events, enabling a host of new capabilities. From things like cross-camera analysis — so you could ask your agent what your kid did when they got home from school — to using device state history to figure out how many loads of laundry you did last week or how long the lights were left on. It will also allow your agent to interact with you via voice, for example, by sending an audio message over your Google Home speaker when it has finished a task. You can also have your agent create a custom dashboard to control your Google Home.
Google Home smart speakers will still be controlled by Gemini for Home, but with MCP enabled third-party AI agents will be able to send voice messages to you through them. Photo: Jennifer Patison Tuohy / The Verge
This doesn’t replace Google’s new Gemini for Home assistant, which remains Google’s interface for interacting with Google Home through the Home app and Google Nest smart speakers, following the demise of Google Assistant. Instead, MCP integration adds another layer of control, allowing third-party AI agents to interact directly with devices connected to Google Home through their own interfaces.
If this week wasn’t dominated by headlines about how AI will kill us all, I’d be really excited about this
At launch, availability is limited to Google Home Premium Advanced users in the US ($20/month or $200/year), with access rolling out in the coming weeks. Setup requires creating a Google Cloud project and configuring it to use the Home MCP.
Giving an AI agent access to real-world devices like smart locks, thermostats, and core infrastructure like HVAC systems and appliances raises obvious questions about security, privacy, and safety. Google says Home MCP enforces rate limits and safety protections; for example, it won’t allow an agent to unlock doors. However, depending on your agent, “connecting it to Home MCP can result in unexpected or even undesired behavior,” said Lehman, who recommends reviewing Google’s developer policies and terms of service.
Home Assistant, an open-source smart home platform, has implemented a similar MCP integration that shows what you can do when you give an agent access to your smart home system. I tested this last year to use Claude to vibe-code my smart home, and it easily handled some of the more complex tasks that most interfaces — and users, for that matter — struggle with, including troubleshooting, creating automations, designing a dashboard, and setting up more advanced configurations, all using natural language.
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