Google's smart home gets AI camera search – but only for these Nest cameras

The Google smart home is getting one of its biggest upgrades in years. In addition to the recent launch of a new Google TV Streamer and Nest Learning Thermostat, the company is bringing Gemini, its set of artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs), to its smart home experience with new AI-generated summaries, automations, and a Gemini-powered search feature.

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Google Nest security cameras can detect general motion, people, and animals. Google recently updated its cameras with garage door detection through the Nest Aware subscription. This newer feature lets you monitor — using AI image detection — whether or not your garage door was left open.

Gemini-powered Nest surveillance & search

Beginning today, Google is adding Gemini to the smart home Nest cameras in the Google Home app, using AI-powered image recognition to generate descriptions of what the camera captures. This feature is only available for cameras in a Nest Aware Plus subscription.

Google shared the example of a camera looking into a backyard where kids jump into a swimming pool. The description read, “Three children jumping into a swimming pool, chasing after a pool toy. The sun shines brightly, casting long shadows,” instead of an ambiguous “motion detected.”

This approach reduces false alerts and provides rich descriptions of captured information. I asked Google if the feature would work with Nest Aware’s person identification tech, which recognizes previously identified people to give you more specific alerts. Google said this option isn’t available yet, but the company is working on it.

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Thanks to Gemini, you can also search your activity for specific events, such as asking, “When did the kids go into the pool?” The AI assistant can reference a camera overlooking a pool to get the time when people went in.

For Nest Aware Plus subscribers who opt into AI camera search this week, the Nest cameras will show detailed descriptions of clips in the Google Home app and let you search for specific clips by looking up “white dog” or “Amazon delivery truck,” for example.

Coming soon: A more powerful smart home Assistant

Nest cameras’ Gemini-powered alerts will let you create automations based on what is detected in the image. For example, you can ask Google Assistant if your kids left their bikes on the driveway and then tell Assistant to remind them to bring their bikes into the garage when they arrive from school. Gemini will set an automation through a camera to tell whoever arrives between 3:00 pm and 5:00 pm to bring their bikes into the garage. 

Of course, these features will be even more helpful if Google combines them with Nest Aware’s people identification feature. For example, you could ask, “When did X person bring in the groceries?” or give different visitors custom greetings or messages through the video doorbell.

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Google says an updated, Gemini-powered Google Assistant matches “the original vision for a virtual assistant.” Google Assistant currently works like Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri, with natural language processing technology that creates a response to user queries, but is otherwise limited, as it cannot maintain context enough to respond to follow-up questions, for example.

The updated Google Assistant will understand better and speak more naturally than ever before. The technology will handle follow-up questions, maintaining conversational context for more natural and fluid interactions. These updates to existing Nest smart speakers and displays are coming soon.