Google Home AI insights can give you advice about your smart home

with a program like Google HomeAs our smart home devices are tightly integrated into our ecosystem, it’s easy to think of progress in terms of hardware support: Most of the updates we’ve seen the app get are designed to provide compatibility with more and more devices, as we see it now. the Nest Protect smoke detector. But that’s far from the only way the Home is evolving, and this week we discovered a few new directions where Google could be about to bring some new features to the smart home hub.

We’ve got quite a bit of ground to cover here, so let’s jump right into – what else, it’s 2025 – some Gemini AI improvements. Google is on a bit of a warpath to integrate Gemini into every product and service under its domain, and Home is no exception. For everything we’re talking about today, we’re looking at the beta version of Google Home 3.29, and using this release we’ve been able to access the new Floating Action Button (FAB) to view AI-generated insights:

When enabled, Home will provide tips and feedback based on your app usage and interactions with your devices. Google appears to be working on a system to provide feedback based on the quality and usefulness of these ideas, allowing users to filter a few to show only their favorites.

We can also see what appears to be an entirely new UI for creating routines, connecting cards that slide up from the bottom of the screen. While some of this is purely aesthetic, we see Google adding a new “Conditions” section that joins Starts and Actions to define routines. While Home already offers some granular control over the specific situations in which routines should be run through the ability to stack Starts, Conditions should offer clearer and stronger control.

These include setting time ranges, not just specific start times, but perhaps the most interesting option here is Availability, which is available as both a Condition and a Start. It works like Home’s existing support Home and Away modesuses a combination of sensor data from your smart home equipment and location data from your phone to determine whether your home is empty or occupied. And with Terms, you can easily use it as a deciding factor whether the automation works or not.

Other tweaks we’ve seen here are smaller, such as a changed toggle to set individual modes as enabled or disabled. We’re also seeing some progress on features in development that we previously revealed but were not specified at the time. you can remember Google Home vacation mode we saw last year that it looked like it would allow us to configure automations for extended periods away from home. Back then we couldn’t even choose dates for our trip, but now we can finally access that interface:

Like we said, there’s a lot going on here, and many of these changes are probably still up in the air. It’s likely things like AI insights we’ll get at some point, but how Google will integrate them into the Home app may continue to change before that happens. UI elements are always at risk of being rearranged and presented in different styles, and we’ll just have to wait and see which bits here might make the cut. As with the House’s vacation mode, we’ll be monitoring progress along these multiple lines.