Google’s Home app, a command center for the smart home, gets a Gemini upgrade (techcrunch.com)

Google unveiled a major redesign of the Google Home app that centralizes Nest device management and deeply integrates its Gemini AI assistant. The update (rolling out Oct 1) focuses first on reliability and performance — Google cites a 70% faster startup, 80% fewer crashes, hundreds of incremental fixes shipped over the past year, and support across ~800 million devices from 50,000+ OEMs — alongside a cleaner UI with three tabs (Home, Activity, Automation), gesture navigation, native automation editing, and improved camera UX (live views load ~30% faster, 40% fewer playback failures, and >6× higher playback frame rates). For the AI/ML community, the notable piece is Gemini’s embedding into everyday smart-home workflows: an AI-powered “Home Brief” that summarizes daily events, “Ask Home” for natural-language queries, automated creation of device rules from text prompts, and camera clip descriptions that explain what triggered motion. Some of these features (Home Brief, Ask Home, natural-language automations) require Google Home Premium ($10/mo) or are included with Google AI Pro/Ultra. The release signals tighter coupling of large multimodal models with edge/IoT management at massive scale — enabling richer automation and analytics but also concentrating model-driven logic and subscription-gated functionality into core smart-home control. Early access is available from the app via Profile → Home Settings → Early Access.