Google updates its Home app with Gemini smarts (techcrunch.com)

Google has redesigned the Google Home app (rolling out Oct 1) with a major focus on performance, Nest integration and built-in Gemini AI. Google says the app is now 70% faster to start, has 80% fewer crashes, and includes 100+ performance updates — supporting over 800 million devices from 50,000+ OEMs. The overhaul consolidates Nest features into Google Home (thermostats back to 2015, cameras, doorbells, Protect alerts, Yale lock passcodes) and improves camera UX: live views load ~30% faster, playback failures are down ~40%, tiles load instantly and timeline scrubbing runs at >6x higher frame rates. The UI is simplified to three tabs (Home, Activity, Automation) with gesture navigation and native automation editing on iOS/Android. The big AI addition is Gemini-driven tooling: an AI “Home Brief” that summarizes daily activity, an “Ask Home” natural-language search, camera-clip descriptions, and the ability to create multi-device automations by describing them. Event notifications now include rich animated previews and AI summaries (e.g., “kids arrived” vs. “motion detected”). Some features require Google Home Premium ($10/mo) or are included with Google AI Pro/Ultra. For the AI/ML community this signals wider deployment of multimodal video understanding, on-device/cloud tradeoffs at massive scale, and more consumer-facing natural-language automation — all of which could accelerate benchmarks and expectations for real-time household AI.