Google’s Home -app, a command center for the Smart Home, gets a Gemini -upgrade | Techcrunch

Google admits that his Google Home app has not offered the best experience for managing Smart Home devices, and it is now meant to change that. On Wednesday, in addition to new nesting devices and an upcoming Google Home Smart Speaker, the Tech Giant also revealed a redesigned version of the Google Home -App That it promises will work better, centralize the device management and bring its AI assistant -gemini ai into the experience.

Although AI might be the headline about what is new with the Google Home app, the app itself has had an overhaul, in design, performance and reliability, Google claims.

“I want to be very direct, the Google Home app has not been the experience we have always wanted,” said Anish Kattukaran, Chief Product Officer at Google Home and Nest, reporters in a briefing prior to today’s news.

So before the company could work on adding new AI functions, it had to solve the other problems of the app, he said.

“Number one was performance,” he said. “Performance is definitely a journey. We are not at the destination … It must continue to evolve.”

In recent months, Google says that it has made some major improvements, leading to 70% faster startup, 80% fewer crashes and other improvements on batteries and memory. In the past year it is also sent more than 100 performance updates and app functions to the app, which nowadays work on more than 800 million devices of more than 50,000 OEMs, which means that companies that make devices compatible with Google Home. (Google had announced support for 750 million devices at his developer conference in May 2025).

Nest comes ‘home’

In addition, the company works to turn the Google Home app into the only App nest users to manage their devices, more than a decade after the Apparismaker 2014. Over the years that followed, Google has brought slowly and iterative Nest app functions to Google Home, and now thinks the journey is complete. (The Nest app is not yet leaving, but owners of nesting devices must be ready for that final future.)

In terms of devices, the app now supports Nestthermostats from 2015, including their schemes, energy history and hot water boost functions. It also supports nest cameras and doorbells (including migrating their history), the emergency reports of Nest Protect for smoke and co -reports and the pass code management of Nest for the Nest X Yale Locks.

With the focus on Nest, the Google Home app improves camera functions, including a better scrub for going through video, a faster and smoother camera craft and richer animated previews on iOS and Android reports. Google says that Camera Live views 30% faster than before and it reduced the playgrounds by 40%.

Camerategels are also loaded immediately and scrolling through the history of the camera is smoother with a more than 6x higher frame speed, Google claims.

The updated Google Home app now has only three tabs because of the simplicity: at home, activity and automation.

Moreover, it added support for gestures, which means that you could sweep on the home tab to move between all devices and favorite devices, or to go through different dashboards. You can also sweep to move in the camera display, such as sweeping down to see the full camera display, to close, or to switch left and right between the timeline display and the display of events.

On the video player you can do double taps on the left or right to rinse back or fast-forward, as you can on YouTube.

Event reports on iOS or Android are now expanding, with rich, animated previews, making it easier to see what is happening at home from the lock screen of your smartphone. AI can also summarize the activity directly in the reports and in your camera history, so instead of seeing ‘movement detected’, you will see which activity has actually taken place.

The activity book of the Google Home app shows the activity history for your entire house, including devices that are not made by Google or Nest. At the top of the tab is a new AI -driven “home recording” function, which uses Gemini to summarize things that happened that day at home, which saves you from reading hours of warnings and events.

To find specific events, you can use the included filters or just “Home Questions” – The latter is a new way to communicate with Gemini via the app.

This search and help function is persistently accessible via the new header – navigation in Google Home, and will propose related devices and automation when you start typing things, such as “lights” or “Living Room”, for example.

You can use the Gemini AI to ask questions about your home with the help of a natural language, to ask for a specific camera one, to control multiple devices at the same time and make automation by describing them, among other things. This allows Gemini to answer questions as “when did the children come home?” Or “Did I leave the car door open, for example?” For example.

When you view camera events, the AI ​​can also describe the activity that the camera sees, which explains what movement has caused in the house and where it was. This AI description appears under the video clip.

Some AI functions – such as the use of Gemini to make home automation by describing them, asking the home letter and the home – however, require a Google Home Premium subscription. This starts at $ 10 per month, but access is included at Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions without extra costs.

On the Automatisering tab of the Google Home app, users not only see their list of automation, but also what will happen in the coming hours through a new carousel at the top of the screen.

The tab, previously an enclosed web display, is now also native built into iOS and Android, Google Notes, for better performance. The automation editor has also been redesigned, making new options for one -off and conditional automation possible.

Gemini also enables users to gain insight into their home, such as details about their energy consumption. You can ask about things such as how long the AC ran last week, or how long the TV was used at the weekend, among other things.

The Google Home 4.0 app update starts to roll out on October 1 to global users and will continue in the coming days until it reaches all users.

To get the update first, Google says to open the Google Home app, click on your profile icon and then tap ‘Home settings’. Scroll down and select “Early Access” to participate in the test.