This weekend, I turned my house into a test lab for Google’s new Gemini Home AI and subjected my family to 72 hours of surveillance as it watched, interpreted and described our every move. My goal? To find out if an AI that sees everything is actually helpful or just weird.
Read a notification from a nesting camera on a shelf in the kitchen. He added, “Jenny cuts a pie in the kitchen / B washes the dishes in the sink / Jenny gets wine from the refrigerator.” Sometimes, the warnings sounded like the beginning of a joke, “A dog, a man, and two cats walk into the room / Two chickens walk across the patio.”
But these were not jokes. They were mostly accurate descriptions of my travels in and around my home, where I installed multiple Google Nest cameras powered by Gemini for the home. It’s a new AI layer in the Google Home app that interprets footage from cameras and—combined with Nest’s facial recognition feature—offers a written description of events, including who’s there or what’s there, what they’re doing, and sometimes what they’re wearing.
For example, now, instead of “animal detection on porch” alerts I get more descriptive versions telling me it’s two chickens or a dog. One of them required immediate action on my part (my husband is not a fan of chickens on our outdoor couch). The other I can ignore. Alerts from the nest doorbell at 1 a.m., which makes it clear that it’s trying to enter my son’s front door, are less anxiety-inducing than one that just says “person detected.”
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Using AI to improve the constant barrage of information from security cameras is a major upgrade. It’s one that every manufacturer from Ring to Arlo to Wiz is chasing. But how much can we really trust AI to keep an eye on our home?
While the Gemini didn’t spoof strangers or wildlife in my house as others have reported, its daily summaries — called Home Briefs — in the Google Home app lean more toward fiction than reality. This is where the Gemini Ai in the house causes trouble.
I don’t record my family inside my house. I leave the security on the outdoor cameras and set any indoor cameras to turn off when we’re home. But I wanted to give Gemini as much information as possible, so I wired my house with cameras ready to record.
I got the new Nest Doorbell 2K, Nest Cam Indoor 2K, and Nest Cam Outdoor 2K (all wired), along with some earlier models compatible with Gemini. This provided major traffic routes in and out of my house as well as a large portion of my backyard.
When my husband left the house with the shotgun, the alert said he was carrying a garden tool
Gemini Description and Home Brief, which are currently in early access, require a $20 per month or $200 per year Google Home Premium advance subscription, which includes 24/7 video recording. The AI analyzes video, not just audio, perhaps because it’s using a vision language model for processing. Gemini AI has also adopted a new feature in the Google Home app called Ask, which lets you search for recorded video, presented by color.
When I tested Ring’s version of Video Search, I found it helpful in keeping tabs on my outdoor cat. Google’s version is better, because it understands the context of my requests. When I asked both to show me the last time the chickens were on my porch, Gemini brought up the most recent sighting, while Ring showed me the best match, which was three days ago.
But aside from finding the wrong animals, I’ve struggled to find value in this blow-by-blow account of the steps taken in my home. And yes, it feels weird.
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Real-time alerts were mostly accurate and straightforward. I’ve only seen two major mistakes: He mistook my dog for a fox in the backyard, and while I waited to pick up a package sitting on my doorstep, anyone approaching the door became someone delivering the package.
However, Gemini seems to have some selective interpretations. I tried to say I was holding a knife – even brandishing it threateningly on camera. But it will only use words like cutting or carving in the description, no mention of a knife. And it was a big knife!
When my husband left the house with a shotgun, the warning said he was carrying a garden tool. It’s not clear if this is intentional (I reached out to Google), but not identifying weapons seems like a significant oversight for a security-oriented system. I want to know if someone has a gun on my porch or a knife in my house.
Google Home needs a way to prioritize urgent alerts over less important ones
Daily Home Briefs is where it gets weird. Every night around 8:30 p.m., the Google Home app presents its interpretation of the day’s events in a new activity tab. You can customize it to focus on the things that interest you the most. For me, it’s animals and teenagers arriving home at curfew.
The summaries were about 80% correct, with a few minor quibbles – it said a pizza oven was provided when I was actually carrying it. But my main problem was with the heavy-handed editorial bodies in the summary. Gemini took accurate chronological descriptions of events and turned them into a narrative filled with declarative sentences that were simply false.
For example, on Halloween, the synopsis stated that “Jenny and R were seen interacting with trick-or-treaters and enjoying the festive atmosphere.” When I spent out of Kandy, my daughter R was not home. Another summary described how my husband and I, along with others, had an enjoyable evening relaxing on the sofa. We were home alone.
Homebrief is an interesting concept. Getting an end-of-day summary instead of being constantly distracted by alerts throughout the day can help reduce notification fatigue. But that doesn’t mean I can turn off real-time notifications. I don’t want to wait for the evening happy home brief to find out about someone breaking into my car at 6 p.m., or that the fox got into the hen house.
Google Home needs a way to prioritize urgent alerts over less important ones. It also needs to integrate with my smart home so I can use specific events — like chickens on the porch — to trigger automated responses.
But making things like house briefs is unforgivable for a system used to protect the home. Google Home notes that Gemini can make mistakes and offers short clips below the Home screen so you can test its operation, for example, to see if my husband and I were sitting alone in the room after all. But while Gemini may be able to explain what’s going on, it’s the attempts to make things that rarely fall through.
While I found the AI description useful for outdoor cameras, the Gemini’s “intelligence” doesn’t make me want to run cameras indoors. If I’m going to consider AI describing my family’s life, it needs to be much more useful and much more accurate.
