For those in the Google Home Public Preview, you can now control your smart home devices and compatible accessories with what’s described as “natural language” thanks to the updated Google Home extension inside of the Gemini mobile app.
This means that to control your smart home stuff, you’ll simply open up the Gemini app and tell it what to do. Simple, right? Here are a few examples Google provided for how you can speak to Gemini.
- Set the dining room for a romantic date night
- Turn off the bedroom TV and lights
- The sun is too bright in the living room (to close window coverings)
- Help me clean up the kitchen (to start vacuum)
This change is rolling out starting today and over the next few weeks to those enrolled. Hopefully testing goes smoothly.
I would just like it to be able to call places by searching the internet like the Google Assistant used to.
This is the biggest paint point for me at least, I have tried everything.
I dont get the Gemini hype when Google Assistant did all this already.
The only thing I'm interested in is the "natural language". I can control my Google Home fine and get it to do exactly what I want. My wife is constantly arguing with her, trying to remember the names of devices. Hopefully this will make it easier for her to embrace it. 🙂
Google thinks they are great at rebranding the same product in a new wrapper every few years regardless of how good or bad it is.
Eg: nest thermostats, google home, Gpay, GChat, etc. In fact, Google Assistant did the same things okay-Google-now did almost a decade ago. In fact the newly released Google Assistant didn't enable all features that it was capable of and re-released it later.
I fear they're going to discontinue the Broadcast command since not even this Gemini extension supports it
Good catch! I didn't notice that. That is probably the 2nd most used function at my house!
Be careful with this one, least Google snuffs out the sun!
This definitely started rolling out weeks ago as I used Gemini to turn on/off my lights then.
I mean we could do it forever with Google Assistant. This Gemini can kick the curb.