Google’s New Home Gadget Refresh Gets a Thumbs Up From Me
Speaking of home gadgets, I just watched Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from The Verge run through Google’s home products announcements. There’s a lot that I like with what they’ve done on this go. I’m not going to recap everything from their video, I just want to share my favorite bits that I’d like to see some to more home products — so you should watch it yourself.
TV Streamer with “Favorite” button and remote finder. Google took a page from Apple’s book and ditched their Chromecast dongle strategy, replacing it with a more traditional set-top box. But it’s quite mini, and I like the wedge shape that makes it stand out even less sitting in front of your TV. The fact that the box has a physical button to activate an alert sound on the remote is genius. The remote itself has a “Favorite” button that the user can customize to open certain apps or actions. Yes, let’s put Action Buttons on all the things!
Redesigned Nest Learning Thermostat. Sounds like Google got the message that the last “lite” version of the Nest Thermostat wasn’t very well received. And while they’ve done the biggest redesign of their flagship version in 13 years, I’m pleased to see it retain a lot of its iconic design. The rotating ring remains for navigating the interface, and it’s quite sleek overall. They’ve done a good job making it fit in with more of Google’s hardware products too. The other nice improvement is more explanation available for users to understand why the Learning Thermostat makes the decisions it does regarding heating and cooling the home.
Google Home with Gemini Inside. Quick hot take: I think Google would have been better served to roll their AI stuff into the existing ‘Google Assistant’ branding like Apple is doing with Siri and Apple Intelligence. Because it replaced Bard, I think of Gemini as a text assistant, whereas Google Assistant is more all-encompassing. Anyway, the Google Home app/system is getting Gemini smarts for describing scenes your cameras see, and to more easily set up automations. Both are great ideas. The first, I’d prefer if that processing was done on-device, but if you’re already cool sending all your camera views to Google then you probably don’t care. The second, the demo looked like something Siri should be able to do as well once it’s infused with Apple Intelligence, but that remains to be seen. I think helping users configure smart home automations — tricky enough at baseline, and notoriously hard with Google Home — is a great use for AI.
This is post #10/31 for Blaugust 2024.