Gemini for Home: Expanding the Platform for a New Era of Smart Home AI

2025年10月1日
Matt Van Der Staay Sr. Engineering Director Google Home

Bring Gemini to Your Smart Home Devices

Today is a pivotal moment for the smart home. We've just introduced Gemini for Home to the world, a foundational shift in our approach to home AI that replaces the Google Assistant on speakers and displays, brings a new level of intelligence to cameras, and overhauls the Google Home app. For the tens of thousands of developers in our ecosystem, this marks the beginning of a new era of opportunity.

At Google I/O 2025 we shared our plans to bring Gemini to the Home APIs. Today, we’re taking a next step forward in that vision by expanding the platform for Google Home in two key ways: first, by enabling new Gemini-powered features for the devices you’ve already integrated, and second, by launching our new program to help you build the next generation of AI cameras.

A Gemini upgrade for all smart home devices — test your integrations now

A truly helpful home is one where all devices work together, no matter who made them. Through our Works with Google Home program, you’ve already connected over 800M+ devices to our ecosystem via our Google Home Cloud-to-Cloud APIs and Matter.

Today, we're bringing the power of Gemini to all of these devices. This is a significant upgrade to the platform, and the best part is that the core conversational benefits require no additional work from you. Your users will automatically be able to use more natural, conversational language to control your devices and create complex automations.

However, a Gemini-powered home is only as good as the quality of its device integrations. As we begin rolling out Gemini for Home to users this month, it is critical that you begin robustly testing your existing Works with Google Home integrations immediately. A seamless user experience is our shared top priority, and your testing is essential to ensuring your devices perform reliably with these new conversational capabilities. To support you, later this year we will also provide improved data and tools to help you monitor the performance and reliability of your devices with Google Home.

Building the Next Generation of AI Cameras

We believe the power of Gemini for Home shouldn't be limited to just one brand, form factor or price point. So to bring the power of Gemini to everyone, we are taking our "Works with Google Home" promise to the next level by expanding our platform with a new class of partner devices to offer customers more choice.

Our first step is launching a dedicated program for camera makers as part of the platform for Google Home. This isn't just a set of guidelines; it's a complete toolkit to help you build the next generation of AI cameras. The program provides partners with a new hardware reference design, including recommended System on Chips (SoCs), image sensors, and other components from the approved vendor list (AVL). Complementing the hardware is our new device-side Google Home camera embedded SDK. Common across both Nest and partner camera devices, the Google Home camera embedded SDK enables a best-in-class on-device machine learning (ML) framework that handles live view and event history in a unified manner with Google Home’s camera and intelligence cloud—making these products far more advanced than previous Works With Google Home (WWGH) cameras which only provide Live View support. Our Home Intelligence architecture follows a split compute model, where on-device ML provides keyframes and metadata to the camera cloud, which then preserves and prioritizes this information together with the event video for features like Gemini AI Descriptions. By participating in this program you can seamlessly integrate your hardware with Gemini for Home camera features and the entire Google Home ecosystem.

We’re thrilled to announce that our first partner, Walmart, is launching the new onn Indoor Camera Wired and onn Video Doorbell Wired. These devices offer powerful performance, including up to 1080p live view resolution and intelligent alerts, at an affordable price.

And because they are powered by Google Home, they give users access to our new camera understanding in Gemini for Home along with deep integrations into the entire Google Home ecosystem wherever people use it; on speakers, smart displays, phones, tablets, watches, TVs, web and your own app built using the Google Home APIs.

Come Build With Us

Google Home is the best place for developers to build AI experiences for the home. Please join us in building the truly helpful, AI-powered home of the future.