I’ve been keen to try out Gemini for Home since it was announced earlier this year.
While Gemini has yet to impress me on my Pixel phone, I thought that having the voice assistant on my smart speakers could be the turning point.
I’m regularly juggling multiple tasks as I walk around the home, so the ability of Gemini Live to hold a conversation and perform tasks like a human sounded like a dream.
I signed up for early access to Gemini for Home in anticipation of this upgrade, and this week I thought I had been rewarded.
My Google Home app informed me that I was now eligible to subscribe to Google Home Premium, gaining access to Gemini Live on my smart speakers, streamlined automations, and other benefits.
Unfortunately, Google’s unnecessarily confusing rollout left me with a subscription that does nothing.
Google’s obfuscation around Gemini for Home is frustrating
It’s a confusing journey signing up for Home Premium
I was trying to avoid spending money on Home Premium, so before I opened my wallet, I checked to see if anything had changed since my last experiment with the Google Home app.
I asked Gemini in the app to create an automation to turn off the TV when I leave my apartment.
A simple request, and one it promptly rebuffed by informing me I’d need to subscribe to Home Premium to create automations with Gemini. Fair enough.
I was thus pleasantly surprised when I went to subscribe and saw that Google was offering a 30-day free trial.
It struck me as odd that I hadn’t seen any notice of this offer before, but perhaps Google was deliberately hiding it until it had actually rolled out Gemini for Home (more on this fiasco later).
This was the perfect setup for me, so I subscribed, returned to Gemini for Home, and repeated my request.
The sycophancy of AI chatbots is deeply frustrating. Gemini informed me that it had successfully created an automation. Brilliant! But apparently it contained errors. Uh-oh.
I tapped on the automation and checked the error. Apparently, to create this automation, I needed a device with presence sensing.
The only Home devices I know of with presence sensing are cameras and video doorbells, so this made sense to me. What didn’t make sense was why it had bothered to create the automation in the first place.
Nowhere does Google explicitly say which devices have presence sensing or not. I thought that my smart speakers and TV couldn’t do this (which is correct), but verifying this information is impossible just by trawling through Google’s help documents.
What I thought Gemini was capable of turned out to be a lie
Why does Gemini tell me it can do impossible tasks?
What is more concerning is that Gemini doesn’t seem to have access to detailed information about my smart home devices.
I can ask it to broadcast a message on all my smart speakers, but it struggles to understand which smart home devices I own.
It can identify which one I mean when I issue a command like “Play music on my smart speaker,” but it doesn’t seem to know which devices I have when I ask it to create an automation.
I tested it again by asking it to create an automation when presence is detected outside.
Not only did it “successfully” create an automation (containing errors, of course), but part of the automation would apparently turn on my outdoor lights to 100%. I live in an apartment with no outside lights.
If I specifically ask Google to create an automation for an imaginary doorbell, it returns an error. This is the error I would have expected when I asked it to create my first automation.
Yet if I ask it to suggest some automations for my home, it suggests automations based on my speakers. Great! Why doesn’t it know this information all the time?
The issue is that Gemini for Home cannot consistently understand what your devices are capable of when it adds triggers or actions to your automations.
Thus, if you want to use a paid feature of Gemini, you have to already know what automations your devices are capable of.
Isn’t that the point of Gemini? To remove the work?
The worst part is that I nearly paid for this
Gemini as a voice assistant for Google Home hasn’t rolled out to my neck of the woods yet, but this isn’t a problem for my testing.
It’s the same Gemini experience I have on my Pixel; other bonuses are Gemini Live without my phone, smart automations, and improved features for smart cameras and doorbells.
However, Gemini Live for Home isn’t available for me yet, and I don’t own a smart camera or doorbell.
Yet Google was cheerfully willing to let me sign up for this, despite most of the features being unavailable and the automation creation being borderline useless.
It’s easy to see how many people will get confused by the Gemini for Home rollout and end up paying for services they can’t use.
If you, like me, don’t own a smart camera or doorbell, I recommend giving the Home Premium subscription a wide berth. It’s worse than useless.
