Google just made a decision that's going to affect millions of smart homes: they're phasing out Google Assistant and replacing it with Gemini. Starting this month, if you've got a Nest speaker or smart display, your decade-old voice assistant is getting swapped out for Google's AI chatbot.
This isn't a subtle transition. This is Google saying "we're all-in on LLMs now" and hoping everyone's cool with it.
What's Actually Changing
Google is calling it "Gemini for Home," and it's rolling out in the U.S. first through an early access program. The basic pitch is that Gemini will be more conversational, better at understanding context, and less rigid about specific commands.
Instead of having to say "Hey Google, turn on the living room lights," you could theoretically say "Hey Google, make it brighter in here" and it'll figure out what you mean based on which room you're in and what devices you have.
The company is adding 10 new voices that supposedly sound more natural, with realistic pacing and intonation. And Gemini can maintain conversational context, so you can have actual back-and-forth without constantly repeating yourself.
Here's the example Google used: you ask "Hey Google, my dishwasher isn't draining, what should I check first?" Then you follow up with just "Hey Google, the filter looks good, what should I check next?" and Gemini understands you're still talking about the dishwasher.
With the old Assistant, you'd have to start from scratch every time. "Hey Google, my dishwasher still isn't draining after checking the filter, what else should I check?" Because Assistant treated every command as an isolated event.
The Premium Tier Nobody Asked For
Here's where it gets sketchy. The basic Gemini upgrade is free, but Google is introducing a "Google Home Premium" subscription at $10 a month for advanced features.
What's locked behind the paywall? Gemini Live (the more conversational mode), AI-powered notifications, a "Home Brief" feature, searching your video history with natural language, and creating automations with voice commands.
Those last two are interesting. Instead of scrolling through hours of doorbell camera footage, you can ask "show me when the Amazon delivery arrived yesterday" and Gemini will find it. And you can create automation routines just by describing what you want: "turn on the porch light when someone approaches the front door after sunset."
But here's my issue: Google Assistant could already do basic automations through routines. Now they're gating the AI-powered version behind a subscription? It feels like they're taking a feature people already had, making it slightly better, and charging for it.
Oh, and if you already subscribe to Google AI Pro or Ultra, you get Home Premium included. So Google is bundling their home automation features with their productivity AI subscriptions. Make of that what you will.
The Features That Might Actually Be Useful
I'm cynical about the subscription, but I'll admit some of the premium features sound genuinely good. The video history search in particular solves a real problem. My neighbor spent 45 minutes scrubbing through Ring footage trying to find when her package was stolen. Being able to just ask "when did someone take a package from my porch today" would have saved her a lot of frustration.
The Home Brief feature is supposed to give you a personalized summary when you wake up or get home: "Your garage door was left open overnight. You have two packages on the front porch. The laundry finished 20 minutes ago."
That's genuinely useful context, delivered proactively instead of you having to check five different apps. But again, it's $10/month, and I'm not sure the value is there for most people.
What About My Existing Routines?
This is the part Google isn't talking about much. They haven't published a detailed Help Center migration table showing which Assistant features work exactly the same way in Gemini and which ones don't.
Routines are the big question mark. If you've spent years building complex smart home automations with Assistant, it's not clear if those will just automatically work with Gemini or if you'll need to rebuild them.
Google says they're working on feature parity, but "working on" and "already have" are very different things. The official guidance is basically "enroll in early access and test your important routines to see what breaks."
That's... not reassuring for people who have their entire home automation setup dependent on specific Assistant behaviors.
Why This Feels Rushed
Here's my real concern: Google Assistant was far from perfect, but it was stable and predictable. You knew what commands worked and what didn't. The ecosystem was mature.
Gemini is powerful, but it's also unpredictable in the way all LLMs are unpredictable. Sometimes it's brilliant. Sometimes it hallucinates. Sometimes it misunderstands context in weird ways.
Do I really want my home automation controlled by a system that sometimes gets confused? What happens when I say "turn off the lights in 10 minutes" and Gemini decides to have a philosophical conversation about the concept of time instead?
LLMs are amazing for open-ended creative tasks. I'm less convinced they're the right tool for the deterministic, reliable behavior you want from smart home controls.
The Bigger Play Here
This move makes sense if you understand Google's broader AI strategy. They're positioning Gemini as the unified AI interface across all of Google's products—Search, Workspace, Android, and now Home.
The bet is that natural language is the future of all human-computer interaction. Instead of learning specific commands or navigating through menus, you just talk to the AI and it figures out what you want.
And honestly? That vision is compelling. I'd love to have truly conversational control over my smart home. The question is whether the technology is actually ready for that yet.
My gut says Google is forcing this transition faster than the technology warrants because they're terrified of falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI race. They need to show that Gemini is everywhere, doing everything, better than the competition.
What You Should Actually Do
If you have Google smart home devices, you'll see a toggle for early access to Gemini in the Google Home app over the next few weeks. Should you enable it?
Honestly, I'd wait. Let the early adopters find the bugs. Give Google time to achieve actual feature parity with Assistant. Make sure your critical routines still work before you make the switch.
Unless you're the kind of person who enjoys troubleshooting broken smart home setups at 11 PM when you just want to turn off the lights and go to bed. In which case, go wild.
The one exception: if you're already paying for Google AI Pro or Ultra and you get Home Premium included, it's worth playing with the advanced features. The video history search alone might be valuable if you have outdoor cameras.
The Part Nobody's Saying
This transition is Google admitting that the old paradigm—specific voice commands triggering specific actions—is dead. LLMs have changed what's possible, and there's no going back.
But I wonder if we're moving too fast. Assistant had a decade to mature. Gemini is barely two years old as a product. Are we sure it's ready to control millions of people's homes?
I don't know. But I know Google has made the decision, and the rest of us get to be beta testers whether we want to be or not.
At least the new voices sound nice. That's something.