Gemini is gradually making its way to every piece of hardware Google touches. It’s already available on Android phones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, and desktop and laptop computers through a full-featured web app. The AI assistant is slated to come to more platforms throughout this year: Wear OS, cards, and even Google’s smart speakers and displays.
Those last platforms are where I want Gemini the most. Gemini on smart speakers just makes sense: you can only ever interface with smart speakers by voice, and for all its flaws, Gemini is unequivocally better at understanding spoken words than the legacy Google Assistant. It’s in the works, but Google, get a move on.
Google announced its intentions to bring Gemini to its smart speakers last year. Technically, these speakers won’t be getting Gemini, but a Gemini-powered upgrade to the legacy Google Assistant that’ll see the speakers respond to spoken queries more the way Gemini would. Functionally, though, it should more or less feel like you’re talking to Gemini directly.
Months after Google’s announcement, users started seeing parts of this upgrade in the form of a previously unheard voice responding to certain queries on second-generation Nest Mini speakers. More recently, last month, some Nest Audio users noticed Gemini-themed colors on the speaker’s front LEDs.
But despite Google having added Gemini-powered features to the Google Home Public Preview program months ago, the ability to actually try this new, Gemini-infused Assistant seems to be fairly limited. I’m signed up for Public Preview and have Nest Audio speakers, one of the two currently compatible models, but I still don’t have the option to try Gemini-powered features. To my knowledge, nobody else at AP does, either. Video of the new experience has been circulating online, so some users do have access — but evidently, it’s not many.
Gemini makes for a better voice assistant
The standard Google Assistant sometimes struggles to understand more complex queries — if what you’re asking gets too complicated, your smart speaker is likely to return “Sorry, I didn’t understand.” It’s a little better on smart displays, which have the option of throwing you an “I don’t know, but I found these results on search” and showing a Google Search screen.
By contrast, Gemini doesn’t have that problem. When you’re speaking to Google’s AI assistant, you can ramble for minutes at a time, and it’ll typically piece together what it is you’re trying to ask and deliver an answer.
Google’s AI information-gathering products do have issues with sourcing their information — that is, though Google does present options to track down sources in products like Search AI Mode, responses themselves typically don’t include direct attribution. Ideally, the Gemini-powered Assistant experience on Nest speakers would cite sources the way the current assistant does when it pulls an answer from the web: answers from Nest speakers today often begin with phrases like “According to Wikipedia,” or “According to the website AndroidPolice.com.” I’d like to see that continue once Gemini gets more involved.
Roll it out with new hardware, but bring it to existing speakers too
Google’s existing Nest Audio speakers were released nearly five years ago; the second-gen Nest Mini is going on six. Google’s smart displays could use a refresh, too, and I’m still heartbroken Google discontinued the excellent Google Home Max. Google could use this new Gemini integration as an excuse to launch some new speakers. We haven’t seen anything that indicates that could happen, but I can dream. Even if Google were to release new speakers, though, existing models should get the update as well — and not just the Nest Audio and second-gen Nest Mini that are compatible in Public Preview.
Gemini is far better suited to fielding questions asked verbally than the Google Assistant is, making it a natural fit for smart speaker integration. I’m not sure what the holdup has been up to now, but I’m getting antsy.
