Google has rolled out its long-teased “Gemini for Home” upgrade, overhauling its smart home ecosystem with AI at the center. The company is embedding its Gemini model into existing Nest cameras, doorbells, speakers, and Google Home devices — some new, some existing — with the goal of enabling more conversational, contextual interactions in place of rigid commands. The refreshed Google Home app is now faster, sleeker, and features “Ask Home,” which lets users manage devices and automations with natural language. Some of the more advanced functions — like continuous dialogue through Gemini Live, smart alert summaries, or in-depth video understanding — will require a new subscription tier called Google Home Premium. While Google first demonstrated new Gemini-native Nest Cam and Doorbell hardware today, the AI platform is designed to extend to much of its installed base and third-party devices via APIs.
Sources: Android Central, The Verge
Key Takeaways
– The shift to Gemini for Home replaces Google Assistant on smart home devices and emphasizes freeform, conversational control.
– Legacy Nest and Home devices (from as far back as 2015) will be supported to varying degrees — though full capabilities may be gated by hardware or subscription limits.
– Google Home Premium subscription unlocks the most advanced AI features — the baseline AI experience will be mixed, with some paywalled functionality.
In-Depth
Google’s move with Gemini for Home is ambitious: instead of incremental improvements, it’s repositioning the entire smart home as an AI-driven environment where devices respond to natural conversation, not scripted commands. At its core, Gemini is designed to understand context, follow-up questions, and chained requests — for example, you might say, “Dim the lights, play something calming, and lock the doors,” and the system would interpret your intent as a whole. That’s a different experience than saying “turn on the lights” or “set thermostat to 70” one at a time.
What’s clever (or controversial, depending on your view) is how Google is trying to retrofit this into its existing smart home footprint. Rather than forcing wholesale hardware upgrades, Google is making Gemini functionality available to devices already in customer homes — with eligibility depending on whether the hardware has enough processing headroom or sensor capabilities. This gives the company scale: it can reach over 800 million devices already connected via Google’s Home and Nest ecosystem. But because older devices lack the full hardware pipeline, not all will support every feature.
The Home app gets a full refresh, too. It’s being restructured to be faster and more stable, with three primary tabs: Home, Activity, and Automations. The “Ask Home” interface is central — a chat box where you can type or speak requests (“What happened today? Who’s at the front door?”) that Gemini can parse and execute. In preview versions, users report faster load times and smoother video playback in camera interfaces.
Of course, the catch: the highest-value AI capabilities will be locked behind a subscription. Google Home Premium will be a new tier that unlocks features such as richer video summaries and smart notifications. According to The Verge’s reporting, camera features like “Home Brief” and advanced alerts will require that paid tier. Meanwhile, all devices — new and legacy — will receive a baseline layer of Gemini intelligence to support basic conversational automation without the full bells and whistles.
Timing matters. As of early October 2025, Google is pushing out the app update and starting eligibility checks for device support. The voice assistant side (i.e. replacing Google Assistant) is expected to follow shortly via an early access program. Rollouts to new regions and extended features will likely stretch into 2026 as hardware and localization needs catch up.
This is also a direct bid to compete more aggressively against Amazon Alexa and other AI-first smart home platforms. By layering Gemini across devices and charging for premium capabilities, Google is betting many users will see enough value to subscribe. But the success of that bet depends closely on how reliable and trustworthy Gemini behaves in everyday homes — how well it handles privacy, accuracy, and seamless interoperability when the lights are supposed to go off at bedtime, or you ask it to let the cat in.
In short: Google isn’t just upgrading its smart home lineup — it’s rethinking how we talk to our homes and who pays for that intelligence.