Google Home app gets surprise early AI upgrade for a lucky few, and I'm jealous (www.techradar.com)

Google appears to have begun an early rollout of a major Google Home app redesign that integrates Gemini into its smart‑home experience, with screenshots from an iPhone 16 Pro Max surfacing on Reddit ahead of the official October 1 launch. The UI compresses five tabs into three — Home, Activity, and Automations — and adds a prominent “Ask Home” bar that lets users manage devices and build automations using natural‑language prompts. Access to Gemini features requires users to acknowledge how their data may be used, signaling explicit consent and cloud processing implications. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it represents Gemini’s deeper push from phones into ambient computing and consumer IoT: LLM‑driven natural language will replace much of the manual, rule‑based automation setup, potentially democratizing complex automations and improving UX for nontechnical users. It also raises important privacy and deployment questions (what runs locally vs. in the cloud, how data is retained and used for model improvements). The update positions Google to compete directly with upcoming Amazon hardware and marks a step toward ubiquitous conversational AI in the home, while highlighting the need for transparent data governance as LLMs become the interface for everyday devices.