After a week of putting Google’s new Gemini for Android app through its paces, I’m excited by the prospect of a new generation of Nest devices that are powered by genuinely useful AI.
I say “genuinely useful” because the AI that currently runs on Google’s Nest products, Assistant, has become decreasingly useful over the years. Things started well enough, back in 2016 I extensively reviewed Alexa and Assistant. I asked them tens of easy and complex questions and requested help with various household tasks. I ultimately came to the conclusion that they’re a bit of gimmicky fun with a sprinkling of useful functionality.
Eight years on and that conclusion still holds true. The in-depth skills, like cooking instructions, still don’t work very well and Google has recently decided to delete some of these tools anyway.
Speak to Nest users (myself included) and you will hear endless complaints about slower response times, misunderstanding requests, ignoring wake words and not recognising already in-use connected devices.
Gemini’s rollout on Android offers a slither of hope, though. Let’s take cooking help, I asked Gemini “I want to make a quick Thai fish curry, what flavors do I need?” and the AI gave me a breakdown of the key flavors of a Thai fish curry in bullet points. It told me to focus on flavor profiles like sourness, heat, creaminess from coconut milk and certain aromatics.
It didn’t give me a recipe, it gave me a blueprint from which I could work from. The result was delicious and surprisingly pain-free.
I asked my Nest Hub the same question and I got a search result with recipes and videos. That’s not bad, it’s just not what I needed. I don’t want to scroll through Google’s selection of recipes on a stuttery display, nor do I want to watch a 17-minute video.
I want to interact with the technology as little as possible, which is exactly what Gemini provided. It gave me a definitive answer and I didn’t need to ask it a few times to trigger the right response. It understood me.
Gemini is, or has the potential to be, a true household assistant. I put a recipe into Gemini and asked it to strip out the ingredients into bullet points and put them into a shopping list on Google Keep. It did the first two tasks perfectly, but it couldn’t connect up with Keep.
If there’s a future where it can, and I imagine there will be because this is all Google tech, then that is exciting. Imagine asking your Gemini Nest Hub to find three different recipes and put the ingredients into your shopping list, which is then instantly ready on your phone, with no manual intervention needed other than a single prompt.
I asked Gemini about an error code on my NAS server, and it gave me a short answer and a simplified solution, which fixed the problem. This was a lot easier than making sense of slightly baffling tech talk on the manufacturer’s forums. I have peppered the AI with questions for solutions to DIY problems, surgery recovery and cooking advice. All have yielded good results for things that I can independently double-check.
Although impressive, this is fairly standard new-era chatbot stuff. Where Google’s tech gets exciting is in other potential scenarios like asking, in natural language, what my smart security cameras have seen that day. How many times has Gemini seen my neighbor’s cat relieve himself in my garden? Or asking the AI to create a sleep routine—without any preparation—by setting the lights and playing an audio meditation guide that it found itself. To me, the real power of Gemini is its ability to do the legwork of making the most out of my other devices.
The problem is that Gemini doesn’t have control of your smart home yet, so Assistant is still the go-to platform. Gemini can’t even do basic things like opening apps or making changes to phone settings. These the basics Google will nail to nail to convince burned Assistant users of Gemini’s potential.
It very much seems like Google is planning to replace Assistant with Gemini imminently. Indeed, once you download the new AI your phone will make you choose between using Assistant and Gemini. How simple a process it is to give Gemini access to your connected devices remains to be seen, but clearly that’s Google’s grand plan and it is an exciting one.
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