Google’s efforts in the smart home have been a mixed bag, and that’s a nice way of putting it. For many users, Google’s handful of fumbles in Home, Nest, and especially Assistant, have burned trust, but Google says it is “committed” to earning that back.
To quickly summarize the issues at hand with Google’s smart home, we can start with Assistant. Both before and especially since the debut of Gemini, the experience of using Google Assistant on smart speakers and displays has been crumbling. Commands often don’t work at all, and there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. That’s alongside Google having removed quite a few Assistant features (due to low usage), and Nest changing completely. Some older hardware has reached the end of its life, it took a long time for the Home app to replicate the best parts of the Nest app, and there are some devices that have been discontinued that just have no replacement.
Despite all of that, Google says it still wants to earn back your trust.
On Twitter/X, Google Home chief Anish Kattukaran says that “we are committed to earning back your trust and love,” and points out that that’s starting with the rollout of Gemini to existing products rather than forcing customers to buy new ones.
Amid everything we launched/started rolling out last week, our most important message is our focus on prioritizing our existing Nest and Assistant users. We are committed to earning back your trust and love. I have no allusions that doing that will be easy. We’ll have to work for it but this quote captures the essence of that approach and commitment.
Kattukaran pulls a quote from a Wired article which points out Google’s move as the polar opposite of Amazon’s, as new Alexa improvements are coming to newly-released Amazon devices before any older hardware. The quote says: “Whereas Amazon says the fastest way for you to access Alexa+ is by buying one of the new Echo devices it announced yesterday, Google is prioritizing existing devices first.”
What do you think of Google’s direction?
As we mentioned in a post over the weekend, the future of Google Home is brighter than ever thanks to Gemini integration fueling new, useful features, as well as Google’s expansion of third-party hardware. But, obviously, there’s still a lot of hope involved there, and we’ll have to wait and see how this all works in action if Google wants to, as Kattukaran says, “earn” back that trust.
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