As you may already be painfully aware of, Google made a big change to the voice assistant powering its smart speakers. Gone are the days of the regular Google Assistant, and here are the days of Gemini for Home, an assistant that’s infused with the power of Google’s AI chatbot. Google promised a lot of things with its Gemini update, but one thing it didn’t mention was that everyday commands would get a lot slower.
Having used an old Nest Mini speaker almost every day since the update, I can corroborate that slowness. It’s been rough, but Google says it has a fix. Kind of…. sort of. In a new March 17 update, Google says it has patched a few bugs in Gemini for Home and that its voice assistant is now 40% faster at processing “everyday commands” like “turn on the lights.”
I tested the update myself, and that 40% figure feels kind of accurate. In a half-dozen commands to turn my lights on or off, Gemini for Home was speedy most of the time, though in one of those interactions, it took a four-second pause to turn my bedroom lights on—about the same pause I was getting before the update. When asking about the weather, there was still a brief pause (between two to three seconds), but it did feel a bit speedier than before. That’s all to say that Gemini for Home does indeed feel mildly less aggravating than it was before, which probably isn’t quite the reception Google was hoping for.
Google also says it’s adjusted the “verbosity” of responses, which is another (probably welcome) way of making Gemini for Home less annoying. According to Google, that means responses for things like alarms should be a lot more concise, i.e., instead of “Alright, I’ve created an alarm for 9 a.m.,” Gemini will say, “Alarm set for 9 a.m.” Google also fixed some bugs with timers, allowing users to set recurring alarms, and also fixed the snooze alarm command so that you can snooze until specific times.
Nothing in the update is particularly mindblowing, but the types of tweaks say a lot about the Gemini for Home rollout. Adding Gemini to Google’s smart speakers was supposed to feel like a major step forward, and while Gemini for Home definitely sounds more conversational, it’s felt mostly like added friction to the smart home experience. The fact of the matter is that most people want to just turn their lights on or off and set alarms so they know when their pasta is done, and unfortunately, large language models like Gemini aren’t ideal for those tasks since they tend to overthink.
As somebody in the Google smart home ecosystem, I’m glad that the company appears to be fine-tuning the experience, but right now (even with a 40% speed boost), the whole thing still feels like a step back in terms of fluidity. Maybe Google can rein in Gemini and make it the obedient and speedy voice assistant we’d hoped for, but clearly it’s going to take some time.
