Google Home – Live Laugh Love Do http://livelaughlovedo.com A Super Fun Site Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:34:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 Google starts rolling out Gemini for Home to early access users http://livelaughlovedo.com/google-starts-rolling-out-gemini-for-home-to-early-access-users/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/google-starts-rolling-out-gemini-for-home-to-early-access-users/#respond Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:34:43 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/10/07/google-starts-rolling-out-gemini-for-home-to-early-access-users/ [ad_1]

Google Home app stock photo 10

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

TL;DR

  • Google has started rolling out Gemini for Home to Google Home users.
  • To try Gemini’s Home features, such as Ask Home, you need to sign up for the early access program.
  • Later this month, Google will start rolling out Gemini for Home more broadly to early access users in the US.

Google has started rolling out Gemini for Home to Google Home users who signed up for the early access program. The company announced Gemini for Home just last week, with headline features like Ask Home, which lets you search your devices, video history, and more by asking questions in natural language. Gemini will also enable AI-generated descriptions and context for notifications, summarize moments with the new Home Brief, and more.

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While Gemini is coming to Google Home at large, users who want it right now need to sign up for the Early Access program. To join the early access program, users can open the Google Home app (version 4.0 and above), go to Settings > Early Access, and sign up.

Some members of our team who signed up for early access to Gemini for Home are now receiving emails stating that the AI helper is now available for them to use in the Google Home app. It’s important to note that Gemini for Home’s early access program is not the same as Google Home’s public preview program, so you’ll need to sign up for it separately, even if you’re a public preview user.

Google Home Gemini For Home rollout email

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

Gemini for Home started rolling out to cameras and doorbells on October 1 in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. The company says the rollout for smart speakers and displays will start more broadly later this month in the US, with more countries to follow in early 2026.

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]]> http://livelaughlovedo.com/google-starts-rolling-out-gemini-for-home-to-early-access-users/feed/ 0 Google’s Smart Home Ecosystem Is Crumbling http://livelaughlovedo.com/googles-smart-home-ecosystem-is-crumbling/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/googles-smart-home-ecosystem-is-crumbling/#respond Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:55:49 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/08/05/googles-smart-home-ecosystem-is-crumbling/ [ad_1]

When I started using a Google smart speaker six years ago, I was all in. Voice assistants have never been perfect—in fact, they always kind of sucked—but I found (having also used Alexa and Siri) that Google Assistant sucked just a little bit less than the competition. And the fact that it was actually linked to Google search for real web queries made it even better. Flash forward to now, and everything I just wrote couldn’t be further from the truth.

Things are arguably worse for the Google Assistant and Google’s entire smart home ecosystem than they’ve ever been, and the transition (or full-on enshittification, if you’re feeling spicy) into the dumpster was seemingly fast. As a result of that dysfunction, people who use the Google Home platform as their hub for smart home products like lights, cameras, and speakers have been pouring their frustrations onto forums like Reddit en masse over the past month.

For those not-so-happy customers, the Google Home app seemed to be flat-out broken, meaning some affected couldn’t even turn their lights on or off. When I say shit was broken, I mean shit was broken. Those problems were, in fact, so bad that Google addressed issues publicly on social media and promised to do better. Things did not improve, however. Issues for lots of people have persisted, and last week, news of a possible class action lawsuit started to percolate. Yikes.

If you haven’t been using Google products for your smart home needs, it may seem surprising that Google could so suddenly and rapidly drop the ball on an entire ecosystem of hardware and software. If you have been using Google Home and Google Assistant for your smart home needs, however, you’re less likely to be surprised by the recent fallout. As someone who has been in this ecosystem, I can say from experience that recent blowback isn’t the product of some bug or anything spontaneous, for that matter; it feels more like the product of years of erosion and neglect.

The complaints over Google Home and Google Assistant date back so far that I initially ignored recent issues bubbling up on forums. More dissatisfaction with Google Assistant? In my line of work, we call that a day that ends in “y.” And I’m not the only one. I’m just going to quote this full post below, not because it’s special, but because it’s a common complaint—a part that summarizes the whole.

Photo: Andrew Liszewski
© Andrew Liszewski / Gizmodo

One Redditor wrote on r/GoogleHome two months ago:

“It used to be amazing. Then it started being more and more unreliable for activation. Then not being useful at all for opening times. Then being useless for pretty much any question that involves some thinking. Now I can’t even stop a timer that is actively going off because it thinks that nothing’s playing. I’m so tired of it.”

It’s hard to say when the slide toward the garbage bin started to happen; maybe it was when Google stopped collecting and listening to people’s voice commands years ago; maybe it was when Google started to pivot more towards chatbots and generative AI, leaving its other platforms to rot; maybe the whole Google Home team got locked in some Severance-style room inside of Google’s Mountain View HQ and no one has been able to find them for a few years. Regardless of how we got here, the fact that we’re here now of all times feels almost ironic.

By Google’s estimation—and the estimation of competitors like Amazon and Apple—this is supposed to be a golden age of voice assistants. Thanks to large language models, voice assistants are supposed to get a major glow-up and should be more capable of understanding natural language and multistep commands. Maybe that will still happen, but for now, all of that promise is still in the future, with Siri delayed and Amazon’s Alexa+ idling in early access. I don’t know, maybe you just have to hit rock bottom in order to make progress, but at this point, it’s hard to take Google’s word for it, so all we’re left with is a broken home, so to speak. From the outside, it looks to me like Google’s smart home empire is crumbling, and for the sake of all of us and our stupid smart lights, I hope a fix is in sight.



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]]> http://livelaughlovedo.com/googles-smart-home-ecosystem-is-crumbling/feed/ 0 ‘Ok Google, turn on the lights’ is mysteriously broken for many users http://livelaughlovedo.com/ok-google-turn-on-the-lights-is-mysteriously-broken-for-many-users/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/ok-google-turn-on-the-lights-is-mysteriously-broken-for-many-users/#respond Sat, 26 Jul 2025 23:06:18 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/07/27/ok-google-turn-on-the-lights-is-mysteriously-broken-for-many-users/ [ad_1]

Google Nest Audio with Gemini models demo

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

TL;DR

  • Many users are reporting not being able to control lights or groups of lights with an ‘Ok Google’ command.
  • I noticed this issue on my speakers yesterday, but thought it was a random bug.
  • It seems more widespread, and the Google Nest account has acknowledged the issue.

Yesterday evening, as I went to bed, I told my Google Nest Audio, “Hey Google, turn off all the lights.” Normally, this is one of the easiest commands, and my success rate with it is better than many other commands that continuously fail and irritate me. But this time, I just got back silence. So I shrugged, thinking it’s a glitch, reached out to the Hue button on my bedside table, and long-pressed it to turn off all my lights.

Today, though, my Android Authority colleague Luka pointed out to me dozens of Reddit threads from users who are also having trouble controlling their lights. Turns out this wasn’t a simple glitch but a widespread issue affecting many Google Home and Assistant/Gemini users.

Can you control all your lights and grouped lights with an ‘Ok Google’ command?

8 votes

Google has already acknowledged this issue and replied to all of these threads with:

Hey all,

We’re aware of an issue with using voice commands to control some lights. We’ll share an update as soon as possible, thanks for your patience.

The timing, though, couldn’t be any worse, with the entire Google Home and Assistant platform under fire from lots of frustrated users due to incessant glitches. Chief Product Officer for Google Home and Nest, Anish Kattukaran, acknowledged the worsening experience and promised “a long term solution that provides better reliability and capability.” Anish also said Google has been “actively working on major improvements for sometime [sic] and will have more to share in the fall.”

If you can’t wait until fall to turn off your lights, understandably, Reddit has a list of suggestions that include telling your speaker, “Hey Google, sync all devices,” which forces Google to re-check all of the services you’ve linked to it (like Hue, LifX, Govee, Lutron, Ikea, etc…). If that doesn’t work, you might want to go a bit more nuclear and completely disconnect the service providing your lights, reconnect it, and add back all the lights to their respective rooms. That seems to do it for most people affected by the bug.

Otherwise, you can just wait. The bug has resolved for me without any tricks, and I’m able to control my lights again with my voice.

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