Lots of change is coming to Google Home in the coming weeks, from the replacement of Google Assistant with Gemini for Home to an overhaul of its smart home subscription service, complete with a new name.
Google is rebranding its Nest Aware plans as Google Home Premium, adding a bevy of Gemini-powered features to the service’s two tiers (Standard and Advanced), but it’s not chaning the prices for those tiers.
So yes, the Google Home Premium reboot doesn’t include any price hikes, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Google just boosted the price of its former Nest Aware tiers back in July—perhaps in anticipation of the coming changes.
In any event, here’s the lowdown on what each Google Home Premium tier includes, starting with the least expensive plan.
Standard ($10 a month, also included in Google AI Pro)
- 30 days of video history for all your cameras: Same as the old Nest Aware Plus plan, Google Home Premium Standard will store 30 days of video events in the cloud.
- Intelligent alerts: Another layer of benefits similar to Nest Aware, the Standard tier of Google Home Premium includes alerts for pre-enrolled “familiar faces,” garage door open/closed alerts, smoke and carbon monoxide alarm detection, and package alerts. New to the mix are mobile notifications with zoomed-in image previews that focus on the activity that triggered the alert.
- Gemini for Home: As Google has long promised, Google Assistant is being replaced by a “new experience” powered by Gemini, and Gemini for Home is that new experience. While Gemini can still control your smart home the way Google Assistant did (“Hey Google, turn on office light 5”), it also promises more a more fluid conversational style as well as the ability to understand the context and intent of your commands, meaning (theoretically) you can say things like “Hey Google, it’s too dark in here,” and Gemini will know a) where you are and b) intuit that you want the lights in that room turned up brighter.
- Gemini Live: A more freewheeling conversational mode that you can invoke on a Google Nest Hub tablet or the new Google Home Speaker, Gemini Live lets you hold free-flowing back-and-forth chats with Gemini without having to say the “Hey Google” hot word.
- Natural-language automation: Thanks to Gemini’s AI smarts, Google Home can create automations using natural-language prompts. For example, you could say something like “Hey Google, when nobody’s home, turn all the lights off,” and Gemini will create the automation without the need for stepping through automation menus or wizards.
What you can do with Google Home and Gemini depends on how much you’re willing to pay for a subscription.
Advanced ($20 a month, also included in Google AI Ultra)
The equivalent of the old Nest Aware Plus plan, Google Home Premium Advanced includes all the features in the Standard tier, plus…
- 60 days of event video history for all your cameras: Again, this is the same benefit as Nest Aware Plus users got, and it also includes up to 10 days of 24/7 video recording.
- AI descriptions and alerts: Rather than just getting video descriptions and event notifications that read “Motion detected downstairs,” Gemini will describe the activity captured in the video event: “A person wearing a red jacket was working in the garden.”
- “Ask Home” for video history: You’ll be able to quiz your smart home about recent activity using natural-language queries typed into the “Ask Home” search box, such as “Who ate the plants?” or “What time did the kids come home?”
- Home Brief: A Gemini-composed overview that summarizes the key events of the past 24 hours.
What you get without a paid Google Home Premium subscription
You can still use the Google Home app and Google’s various Nest cams, speakers, and displays, but doing so means giving up on Gemini’s more advanced features. In short, the free tier of Google Home doesn’t include Gemini’s natural-language descriptions, summaries, or conversational features.
What Gemini will do is mimic the same smart home features that Google Assistant performed, including basic device control (“Hey Google, set kitchen lights to 30 percent”) and music playback (“Hey Google, play Taylor Swift in living room”).
You’ll also get six hours of video history on your Nest cameras, up from the previous limit of three hours. (That’s not much, but at least it’s better than the zero hours of video history you’ll get from Ring without a paid Ring Protect plan.)
In a briefing, Google Home and Nest boss Anish Kattukaran stressed that free-tier users won’t lose any functionality once the transition from Google Assistant to Gemini for Home is complete.
“All of the same stuff that you could do [with] the Assistant as far as actions … turning on your lights, playing your music, that’s in Gemini, and that’s in the free tier,” Kattukaran said.
This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras. Also, be sure to check our complete coverage of Google’s Gemini for Home rollout, including details on the new Google Home Speaker and new Nest Cams.
