What you need to know
- The Google Home app gets a full refresh with faster performance, smoother scrolling, and a cleaner, more modern camera experience.
- Cameras now work together with AI to tell a clearer story, with new options for swiping between views, resizing the player, or skipping clips with 10-second jump buttons.
- Gemini 3.1 upgrades the voice assistant, letting you handle complex, multi-step commands in a single request.
Going through hours of security footage to find out who or what set off a motion alert has always been a tedious task. To address that, Google is launching a major Spring 2026 update for the Home app, including a modern, AI-powered camera experience and a smarter smart home system.
In the past, smart cameras worked alone and just saved raw video to a cluttered timeline. With this May update, your cameras now work together to give you a clear story of what’s happening around your home. Google said in a blog post that the app is much faster and smoother, with a new event details page that keeps the video player visible as you scroll. Google also improved the frame rates and reduced lag, so moving through your timeline feels quick and easy.
To make things even faster, there are new camera controls. You can swipe left or right to switch between your Timeline and Events, pull down to resize the video player, or swipe down to close the camera view. Google also added 10-second forward and backward buttons, making it easy to skip through your recorded events.
Article continues belowAction-focused previews
Event feeds are also getting a big visual update. Instead of still, hard-to-read thumbnails, you’ll now see zoomed-in animated previews that focus on the action, like a person, package, vehicle, or pet. If you’re looking for a specific event, you can quickly filter your list by options like "Person seen," "Glass break heard," or activity in a certain area.
Familiar face detection is also improving. The system now automatically cleans up your face library by removing low-quality images, such as blurry, ghosted, small, or side-view faces, to keep things accurate. To help train the AI, users now have thumbs-up and thumbs-down feedback buttons on the familiar face previews.
You’ll need an Advanced plan of Google Home Premium to use Gemini-generated event descriptions. These smart event summaries are coming to older Nest cameras too, as long as you turn on the 'Gemini for Home camera features' in your settings. It’s now easier to find these options, since Google has simplified the camera settings menu and put all "seen" and "heard" events on one page.
Gemini 3.1 voice upgrades
The voice assistant is also getting much smarter. Early access users are being upgraded to Gemini 3.1, which brings better reasoning skills. Now, you can give complex, multi-step commands in one go, like adding new items to a list while updating others, and the system won’t get confused.
The update also adds more home automation options. You can now manage kitchen appliances, control robot vacuums, check smart lock statuses, and see battery levels. Ask Home on Web is coming soon to Public Preview, so you’ll be able to search camera history, check devices, and set up automations from your desktop.
Android Central's Take
I have to admit, living in a busy house with people and dogs setting off motion alerts every few minutes makes AI-generated summaries sound like a great feature. It really saves you from searching through endless false alarms. Still, letting Gemini watch, analyze, and describe every frame of my living room footage raises privacy concerns. While this update finally makes the app smooth and easy to use, be sure you’re comfortable with a cloud-based AI watching and describing your private life before you turn on this feature.
