Google had a special day lined up for Google Home it seems, with announcements around hardware (new Google Home speaker!), the Google Home app, and yes, Gemini within it. We’ll keep it short and sweet to catch you up in a hurry, assuming you missed the news earlier this morning.
First up, we have a new Google Home app with Gemini inside. The app is faster (70%!) and more reliable, with app crashes down nearly 80%, Google says. It’ll also suck your battery less and hog less memory. Your cameras will load faster and fail less often too. Google is also bringing “the best of the Nest app” over to Google Home, with more support for Nest Thermostat models as far back as 2015, plus true support for Nest Protect and the Nest x Yale Lock. Controlling your old Nest cams and doorbells should be smoother and faster as well.
Speaking of cameras, event notifications can now expand to show richer previews, there are swipe gestures to get yoiu through yoiur history, and you can double-tap to fast-forward or rewind, similar to how you would on YouTube. And of course, with Gemini powering some stuff, camera notifications may be smart enough to recognize people and name-drop them upfront.
As far as the design of the app, we’re getting a redesigned bottom bar with that ditches 5 tabs and shortens to 3, which are Home, Activity, and Automations. This should simplify everything or at least lessen the confusion.
Here’s how Google describes each of the 3 tabs that now take up the bottom bar:
- The Home Tab: This is your consolidated overview and access point for your whole home. We’ve also introduced new gestures that make it much more fluid to use with a single hand, letting you easily swipe between your Favorites, all devices and dedicated dashboards without having to switch tabs.
- The Activity Tab: This is now the single history for everything that happens in your home, with events from all your connected first-party and third-party devices. This is where you’ll find Home Brief to get a quick summary of your day.
- The Automations Tab: This tab now features a new carousel at the top that shows you upcoming automations about to run in your home. For those who want to go deeper, we’ve completely rebuilt the editor as a fast, native experience on both iOS and Android. This unlocks powerful capabilities like creating one-time automations or using new conditional starters so a routine only runs if someone is home.
Finally, at the top of the app (once you have it) is an “Ask Home” area that lets you type out device names or types or automations to quickly find them. You can also type (or speak) out more complex tasks with multiple devices being controlled.
The new Google Home app is starting to rollout today as v4.0. It appears to be live on both Android and iOS, although the new 3-tab UI and “Ask Home” sections appear to be a staged server-side rollout. Of course they are.
Google Play Link: Google Home
