Google’s new Gemini for Home is a brilliant AI upgrade, but the best features will cost you

While the new hardware was the star of today’s Google smart home event, the real story is the software that powers it all. Google has officially detailed Gemini for Home, a new “foundational intelligence” that will replace the Google Assistant and fundamentally upgrade the smarts of your entire home ecosystem, from your speakers to your cameras to the Google Home app itself.

This is a massive leap forward, moving beyond a simple, transactional voice assistant to a truly collaborative and conversational AI partner for your home.

A more natural conversation with your home

The most immediate change you’ll notice is in how you talk to your home. Gemini for Home introduces 10 new, more natural-sounding voices and, more importantly, a far better understanding of human conversation.

It can now maintain conversational context, so you don’t have to repeat yourself. If you ask about troubleshooting your dishwasher, your follow-up questions will be understood in that same context. It can also now handle complex requests with exceptions, a huge user request. You can finally say things like, “Hey Google, turn off all the lights, except for the office lights,” and it will just work. This new level of understanding extends to everything from finding a song based on a vague movie description to adding all the ingredients for a recipe to your shopping list with a single command.

Your cameras finally get a brain

One of the most significant upgrades is how Gemini transforms your smart cameras from simple motion detectors into interpreters that can understand what they’re seeing. It’s the difference between a generic “person detected” alert and a truly helpful notification that says, “a USPS delivery driver is placing a package on the porch.” This new intelligence unlocks three powerful new camera features:

• AI Descriptions: More detailed, narrative notifications that tell you the full story behind an alert.
• Home Brief: An automatic, digestible summary of your day’s important events, complete with relevant video clips, delivered each evening.
• Ask Home for Video History: You can now search your entire video history with natural language, asking things like, “Did I leave the car door open?”

‘Ask Home’ makes automation easy for everyone

This new natural language understanding is also coming to the Google Home app with a feature called Ask Home. While you can use it to control devices, its most powerful new capability is creating automations. What was once a niche, power-user feature is now accessible to everyone. You can simply describe what you want in plain English—like “Create an automation to turn on the porch lights and lock the front door every day at sunset”—and Gemini will build it for you.

How you’ll get it (and what it will cost)

This is a massive update, and Google is rolling it out in a few different ways. The entire experience will begin with an early access program that you can sign up for in your Google Home app settings, with the rollout starting this month. Here’s how the features break down:

• The Free Upgrade: The core Gemini for Home voice assistant—the more conversational, better-understanding AI with new voices—will be a free upgrade that replaces the Google Assistant on your existing speakers and displays.
• The Paid Subscription: The most advanced, proactive features will require a new Google Home Premium subscription starting at $10/month. This includes Gemini Live, all the new AI camera features (AI Descriptions, Home Brief, Ask Home for video), and the ability to create automations with Ask Home.

This is a huge and ambitious new chapter for the Google Home ecosystem. While the new subscription model is a significant change, the sheer power and utility of these new Gemini features make this the most exciting development for Google’s smart home in years.