Nest learning Thermostat is getting long-awaited improvements
Google’s Smart Assistant: What’s Happening in Google Home? The Search Engine’s Assistant is Here for It, Not Just a Smartphone
While splashy chatbots may get all the attention, generative AI has real potential to make the smart home simpler and more accessible. Amazon is working on a smarter voice activated assistant that will be able to power your home. Now, it’s Google’s turn to promise that it can produce a better, smarter, more helpful Google Assistant.
Most of these features — aside from the new voice — will be paywalled behind Google’s Nest Aware subscription, its video recording subscription for Nest cameras that starts at $8 a month ($80 a year). The features will launch first in Google’s Public Preview beta program to a limited number of Nest Aware subscribers and will roll out to more users next year.
With the launch of the new Google TV Streamer 4K hub and the promise of a smartergoogle assistant, things are looking good for the company.
The search engine’s assistant is here to stay. Instead of putting it on smart displays to control your home, Google uses Gemini intelligence behind the scenes. Kattukaran says that Gemini has elements of Google Home in it.
The Help Me Become a Robot for Google Home: How Google is Set to Supercharge Google Home with Gemini Intelligence Ai Google Home Nest Aware
A young person in casual clothing, standing next to a parked black SUV. They are carrying things. The area seems peaceful as the car is partially in the garage.
Interpretative details aside, the caption provides a lot of context, which, alongside being helpful, could translate to smarter home automation. For example, if a camera detects an animal and understands that “the dog is digging in the garden,” the next step could be to create an automation to “turn on the sprinklers.”
Texting will be able to be used to search through footage in the activity tab. This could be handy when, say, my cat sneaks out after dark. I want to know if it spotted the cat the last time, not having to scroll through every video to find him.
The help me create feature will allow you to describe what you would like to happen, and then have it create a routine that will do it for you.
It doesn’t work through Nest speakers, so you need to use the Home app on your phone for speech or text input, but it will have the features of the Home app. All the current actions and conditions are included, as well as access to any device that is connected to Google Home. It’s not as complex or sophisticated as Google’s script editor, he says, but it should make creating automations easy for anyone to do.
Plus, Google Assistant is getting new voices with different styles, tones, and accents. The company released a demo of a new voice interacting in some conversation. As you can hear in the video, it retains the female tone but sounds lighter and more natural.
Google Assistant should not only sound more natural but should also communicate more naturally. It doesn’t need a specific name to do what you want, can answer follow up questions, and can handle pauses. I didn’t see an in-person demo of this, but it sounds similar to the features Amazon announced for Alexa last fall (that have yet to arrive).
Source: Google is set to supercharge Google Home with Gemini intelligence
The Google TV Streamer: A New Set-top box for the Google Home, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Media Player and other Home Decor
It’s tailored to your home and your data models. We’re being very intentional about going slow. In the home, the margin for error is very low; we can’t mess up,” he says. The goal is to build a baseline understanding of your home and then get smarter over time, by doing research in your homes rooms and devices.
“When we started out with that first-gen assistant, the promise was The Jetsons; the vision was an ultra helpful assistant that could proactively help you figure things out,” says Kattukaran. “We made a bunch of progress, then it plateaued — across all the assistants, not just us. We hit a technological ceiling. That’s been raised with LLMs and language models that are more multi-modal.”
Google isn’t waiting for its upcoming hardware event to announce the Chromecast’s successor. The introduction of the new set-top box, called theGoogle TV Streamer, along with the sleeker Nest Thermostat, is a sign of how far the company has come.
The bundled remote is the same, but it has gotten a few design changes, for example the volume buttons are on the face, instead of on the side. You can open the panel, use it to launch your favorite app or switch inputs. There’s a remote finder on the back of theGoogle TV Streamer. You can use the remote to locate it in the crevices of your couch cushions, if you Press it.
Hopefully, the changes made will be enough to make the experience smooth and prevent the Streamer from getting bogged down. You can still watch content on the internet if you want, but you have to use the same service you used before. The Chromecast name might be gone, but the functionality isn’t. Also, this has to be the first device powered over the new USB-C standard.
The porcelain and hazel colors are exclusive to the GOOGLE STORE, while the dark gray color is not. Unlike the Chromecast, which could be hidden away behind your TV, the Google TV Streamer is designed to sit underneath it and be seen — without standing out from your other home decor. Part of why Google designed it to be placed out in the open is because the device includes a Thread border router and connectivity support for Matter.
Both devices have a bit of artificial intelligence in them, as well as hardware improvements and elegant designs that better blend the tech into your home. On August 13, the company is expected to announce the new products at the Made by Google event.
Nine years have passed since Google introduced the third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat, but the wait for the fourth-generation model is finally over. Today, the company unveiled its latest smart thermostat. It arrives on the same day as the new version of the Chromecast, called the Google TV Streamer.
