Google Nest Doorbell review: Gemini is a game-changer

Price When Reviewed

$179.99

Best Prices Today: Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen)

Prior to announcing its third-generation Nest Doorbell—along with its other two new security cameras in early October—Google had us thinking it had lost interest in the smart home. While I wouldn’t say this device marks a roaring comeback, it is a very good product; provided you’re willing to pay at least $10 a month ($100 per year) for a Google Home Premium Standard subscription in addition to paying $180 for the device itself.

Like a distressingly large number of smart home and home security devices, the Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3^rd Gen) just isn’t all that useful without a subscription. Yeah, you’ll be notified when someone rings the bell; you’ll get person, pet, vehicle notifications, as well as package notifications when a courier makes a delivery; and you’ll get a live video stream so you can see and have a conversation with whoever’s at the door.

Google’s Gemini is a game-changer, and the new Nest Doorbell’s video resolution; person, pet, vehicle, and package recognition; and other features are best-in-class.

But Google does Ring and some other competitors one better by providing up to six hours of 10-second event video previews without a subscription (Ring doesn’t give you any recordings without a subscription). That said, if you want all the slick features Google touted in its announcement demos—its Gemini AI, in particular—you’ll need to step up to the $20-per-month ($200 per year) level of Google Home Premium Advanced. I’ll go over those details more in a bit.

Specifications

Before we get into those more advanced features, let’s discuss what you get for the price of the product itself. Google’s latest doorbell is taller than it is wide, measuring 5.2 x 1.7 x 1.1 inches (HxWxD). It’s available in three colors: Hazel (beige), Linen (off white), and Snow (white). Google sent the last one for our review.

The camera is at the top of the device, and there’s a large round doorbell button at the bottom. A proximity sensor sets an LED light ring around this button to blinking when someone approaches, and pressing it sounds chime on the doorbell itself (and in the house if you’ve connected it to a chime, as I’ll get to later).

The camera sensor captures video in 2K resolution with a 1:1 aspect ratio (so, 2048 x 2048 pixels). It captures a head-to-toe view of your visitors, and 6x digital zoom enables you to get a very detailed view of them when you pinch-to-zoom in either real time or with a recording (recordings are captured at 30 frames per second).

Two-way audio with noise cancellation lets you converse with visitors, or you can play canned greetings if you’re using the live view feature while you’re away from home or if you just don’t want to interact with them for whatever reason. There are currently only three available phrases: “You can just leave it;” “We’ll be right there,” and “No one can come to the door.”  You can’t record your own canned messages.

The camera itself has a wide 166-degree diagonal field of view that results in very slight barrel distortion. A set of six 850nm infrared LEDs provide black-and-white night vision up to 10 feet, but with any supplementary illumination, you’ll get full color at night. HDR support delivers accurate color reproduction.

If you live in a very cold-weather climate, you’ll want to be aware of the doorbell’s operating temperature range of -4 degrees Fahrenheit to 104 F (-20 to 40 C). It is otherwise well protected from the elements, with an IP65 rating. As our IP code guide tells us, this means it’s impervious to dust and protected from water jets coming from any direction. So, you could hit it with a spray nozzle attached to a garden hose, but it probably wouldn’t withstand a blast from a pressure washer.

Google provides everything you’ll need to install the doorbell, including a base plate, spacers for installing the doorbell on an uneven surface, a wedge that will shift the doorbell’s view 20 degrees left or right, and a hex key and small set screw for securing the doorbell to its mount (I promptly dropped this tiny screw during my installation, where it rolled into oblivion between the planks on my deck). You’ll also find the other screws you’ll need to mount the doorbell, a pigtail wire for connecting the doorbell to a power supply, and a puck-shaped connector for your existing doorbell chime.

Being a wired product, you’ll need to connect the Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd Gen) to a 16-24VAC or 10-40VA transformer. If you’re replacing an existing wired doorbell, you should already have an appropriate transformer installed, so you can just swap your old doorbell for this new one.

The Nest Doorbell can also use your existing mechanical or electronic chime (provided it meets the same power requirements, of course). Google includes a small puck you’ll attach to the chime box for this purpose, but I didn’t use it because I don’t have a chime.

Installation and setup

Google is to be commended for its excellent illustrated, step-by-step in-app instructions that guide you through the installation process. They cover everything from turning the power off to your existing doorbell, to disconnecting the existing wires, uninstalling the old doorbell, connecting the wiring to the doorbell (the provided pigtail makes this step particularly easy), and mounting the doorbell to the wall.

Once you have the doorbell’s mount and wedge (if you use it) installed and the doorbell connected to power, the app will have you scan a QR code on the back of the doorbell to add it to your smart home environment. After a few moments, the app will ask where you’ll be using the doorbell (presenting a list of rooms) and then proceed to download and install the latest firmware. When it’s finished, you should see a live view from the camera.

After a long pitch for Google Home Premium, and a few other rudimentary steps, the app will ask if you want to turn on the doorbell’s video history. I don’t know why you wouldn’t, unless as the app points out, doing so would run afoul of local laws. If you want—or need—to warn visitors that a camera is recording audio and video, Google provides a decal that you apply to a nearby wall or window.

The Nest Doorbell (wired, 3^rd gen) comes with a 30-day free trial of Google Home Premium (you can choose either the Standard or Advanced version). The Standard tier includes 30 days of event-based video history for all the Nest cameras in your home; alerts for familiar faces, garage door status, and the sound of glass breaking as well as the sound of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors sounding off; and an emergency calling feature that lets you call the local-to-your-home 911 dispatcher for emergency help, even when you’re away from home.

Your subscription also includes Gemini for Home, which you can use with your Nest smart speakers and displays. You can also create smart home routines by typing out what you want to accomplish in the Google Home app.

The Advanced tier includes all those features, but it doubles the event-based video history to 60 days,  adds 10 days of 24/7 video recording (useful in the  event there  wasn’t enough motion to trigger the camera to record a clip), provides “descriptive” notifications that provide context to the camera’s alerts, the ability to search the event history for relevant recordings, and daily summaries that recap all the activity that occurred in your Nest cameras’ field of view on a given day.  

That’s a lot of extra features, but $20 per month is a lot of money, especially when it doesn’t include professional monitoring for a complete home security system, which Google no longer offers. It’s worth noting here that Google invested $450 million in ADT in 2020, and ADT bundles Nest doorbells and security cameras with its ADT Smart Home Security System, which I reviewed in October.

For the sake of comparison, Ring’s middle subscription tier for its video doorbells and security cameras costs $10 per month, and if you also have a Ring Alarm home security system, you can add professional monitoring that will dispatch first responders (police, fire, or medical) in an emergency for an additional $10 per month ($20 per month in total).

To be fair, Ring’s top-tier plan, which includes AI for its cameras, plus professional monitoring costs $30 per month. And Ring charges an additional $5 per month for a similar smoke alarm/carbon monoxide listening feature (you can get that by itself or on top of any Ring service tier).

Using the Nest Video Doorbell (wired, 3^rd gen)

The new Nest Video Doorbell’s ability to recognize familiar faces is impressive, within reason. Once I’d trained it with one example of each person who’s at my home with any regularity, it almost never failed to accurately identify those faces when they came within range of camera.

When it correctly identified my grandson’s girlfriend while she was wearing a hoodie, I tried it myself in similar attire, and it correctly identified me as well. But when I tried it a second time, after cinching up my hoodie until I looked like Kenny from South Park, the doorbell merely identified me as a person. More importantly, a human looking at the recording would have no trouble picking me out of a lineup.

Google’s AI certainly isn’t foolproof, however; it routinely mid-identified my 10-pound Chihuahua walking across my deck as a cat, and it once identified a cat walking in my neighbor’s yard as walking on a fence railing. But if you take a quick glance at the zoomed-in screenshot on this page, you might make the same mistake.

Google Gemini can also summarize the activity logged by all its cameras into a daily Home Brief, followed by a time-stamped list thumbnails of the videos that were recorded. If you’re looking for a specific event, you can quiz Gemini by typing questions in the app.

You can do the same with voice commands if you have a Nest smart display—I don’t—but that doesn’t seem to the case with a smartphone, or at least not with the iPhone I use. And if you try it with the existing Nest smart speakers, Google Assistant will just reply “Sorry, I don’t know where to play the video. Please tell me the exact name of the screen.”

You’ll get motion-detection and doorbell-press notifications almost instantly, but it can take several minutes for events to appear in the app’s log.

What’s missing?

The most obvious missing element of the Nest Video Doorbell (wired, 3^rd gen) is right there in its name: There’s no battery. If you don’t have an existing doorbell, you’ll need to install a transformer and pull wire through your walls to the location you want to mount the doorbell. That’s not a difficult task, and if you buy a plug-in transformer, you won’t need to need to deal with high-voltage wiring or hire an electrician.

A bigger issue is that if you don’t have an existing doorbell chime, or if the one you have isn’t compatible with the Nest Video Doorbell, you’ll need to rely on your phone to be notified when someone rings the bell. While you could install your own—especially if you’re installing a transformer anyway—Ring and many other Google competitors have remote chimes that work over Wi-Fi. This could be an opening for a third-party vendor, but I couldn’t find any that were compatible with this 3^rd-generation device (there are several that are compatible with 1^st– and 2^nd-generation Nest doorbells.

And there are a couple of features that Eufy security cameras have that I’d love to see Google copy. First and foremost is the ability to track a person entering and exiting the fields of view of multiple outdoor cameras, and then have those feeds stitched together into a single continuous video. Eufy’s cameras can also control the behavior of Eufy’s smart outdoor lights, so that the presence of a stranger can trigger its colored lights to switch to a bright white or even start flashing as a warning. It might be possible to achieve that second behavior with Google’s new doorbell thanks to its Matter support, but I didn’t explore that. (Correction: The doorbell is not Matter compatible, given that there is no security camera standard in the current version of Matter).

It’s also worth repeating that Google doesn’t offer its own comprehensive home security system, and while you can use its cameras in ADT’s system, they’ll be managed by ADT, not Google, and you won’t get Gemini.

Should you buy the Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3^rd gen)?

If your smart home revolves around Google Home, and you have the required infrastructure or are willing to install it, the Nest Doorbell (wired, 3^rd gen) is an easy recommendation. Gemini is impressive enough to be a game-changer, and the camera’s video resolution, person, pet, vehicle, and package recognition, and the rest of doorbell’s many other features are excellent.

If you’re not already wedded to a home security ecosystem, or if you’re only looking for a video doorbell, the latest Nest doorbell is among the best on the market, and it’s priced accordingly. It’s not worth paying $10 a month—$20 a month for Gemini—if you only have the doorbell, but that calculation changes if you’re deploying other Nest cameras as well.

It’s too early to say that Gemini is worth dumping whatever other home security ecosystem you might have in favor of Google Home. The competition in this space is fierce, and lots of companies make great video doorbells: Ring, of course, but also Aqara, Blink, Eufy, Lorex, Reolink, Tapo, and Wyze Labs. But in terms of AI, Google and Ring are leagues ahead of the competition (we haven’t had an opportunity to review Ring’s latest offerings).

All that said, my biggest reservation about recommending the latest Nest cameras overall is that Google no longer has a comprehensive system with door/window and motion sensors, alarms, smoke and CO detectors, and professional monitoring. So, don’t buy this product if those things are important to you.

But my bottom-line recommendation of the Ring Doorbell (wired, 3^rd gen) assumes you just want a great video doorbell and those other considerations aren’t important to you. The fact that don’t need a subscription to get a limited number of event recordings is a big plus; and if you’re willing to pay for it, Gemini is pretty amazing.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best video doorbells.

Correction: This review was updated shortly after publication to report that the Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) is not Matter compatible, given that security cameras are not defined in the Matter standard as of this writing.