Jimmy Westenberg / Android Authority
TL;DR Gemini for Home begins early access this October.
While it sounds like you’ll have the option to stick with Assistant for a while, Google is clear that Gemini for Home will eventually replace it.
Gemini for Home is set to be available in both free and paid versions, though Google has yet to share more about its plans there.
For the past couple years, Google has been working to flesh out its next-gen AI efforts, and offering us plenty of opportunities to try out that progress for ourselves. But now in 2025, Gemini is becoming less of an option, and more of an inevitability. That’s already started with Assistant on our phones, and now we’re getting ready for it to extend across smart speakers and displays, as Google shares its plans about Gemini for Home.
Gemini for Home will be ready to handle many of the same sort of tasks you rely on Assistant for now, like navigating smart home controls, playing media, and helping you organize your day. Compared to Assistant, Google says users can look forward to a system that’s better able to understand even complex requests — like adjusting smart home settings everywhere except for a specific room. And just like you’re familiar with from on your phone, it will be happy to try answering whatever questions you throw at it.
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That Gemini support on your smart devices will extend to Gemini Live, letting you engage in natural-feeling back-and-forth conversations with Google’s agent. That sounds particularly useful when you’re tackling a task you’re wildly unfamiliar with, and want to try relying on Google’s AI “smarts” to offer a little reassurance as you have it walk you through the steps — and hopefully not mess anything up too badly.
Google Assistant on your smart speaker may read classic bedtime stories to your kids, but Gemini for Home on your smart speaker will take that to the next level by creating a custom story based on your prompts.
While there’s a lot that sounds promising here, the devil’s in the details, and there are still plenty of edge cases where Gemini just hasn’t been able to function at quite the same level that Assistant has — juggling multiple calendars and multiple languages stand out as some particular pain points in our mind. We’ve reached out to Google in the hopes of getting some assurance that these areas might be getting better, but so far we just have faith to go on.
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