Google Wants You to Talk to Your Nest Cameras and Doorbell to Find Out What They Recorded

Hot on the heels of Amazon’s own Ring and Blink security camera blitz, Google is announcing new Nest cameras with its Gemini AI chatbot as the main selling point in addition to improved image quality. Thankfully, there are only three new Nest products, and they’re relatively easy to understand, unlike Amazon’s entire lineup, which may require a PhD to figure out the differences between each model.

New Nest Outdoor, Indoor, and Doorbell cameras

The three new Nest cameras are the $150 Nest Outdoor Camera (wired, 2nd-gen), $100 Nest Indoor Camera (wired, 3rd-gen), and $180 Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd-gen). You have some neutral colors like Snow (white) and Hazel, but the most striking color is the “berry” red model for the Indoor Camera. I prefer my security cameras to blend into the walls and ceilings, but if you’ve ever wanted a bright, berry-colored camera watching you from above, now you can live out your wildest dreams.

On the hardware front, all three Nest cameras boast 2K-resolution image sensors with HDR. Google says the sensors greatly improve recorded video footage quality, especially for low-light and night video. Equally important is the new wider and taller field of view (152 degrees on the Indoor Camera and Outdoor Camera and 166 degrees on the Nest Doorbell)—essential for capturing more in video so that Gemini can have more information to process and understand. With older Nest cameras and the doorbell, they could only send notifications alerting you to motion or sound, but with Gemini, Google says users will be able to get more specific notifications that describe what’s happening.

For example, if a delivery person comes by your door to drop off a package, Gemini should send a notification describing their clothing and might even get as specific as telling you which delivery service they may be from if it can see a uniform logo or truck in the background. At home, with the Nest Indoor Camera and Outdoor Camera, Gemini could send a notification telling you that your cat knocked over a glass vase or perhaps your child named John (you need to allow face recognition) was playing in the backyard at 4 p.m. instead of doing his homework like you asked him to.

Gemini also has a feature called “Ask Home,” which combines computer vision from the cameras and natural language processing to find specific clips instead of you having to scrub frame by frame, through hours of footage. Google says you’ll be able to simply ask Gemini to find something from footage. “What happened to the vase in the living room?” is one example, the company shared.

There are some additional quality-of-life improvements for springing for the new cameras, including “Home Brief” (summary of hours of footage), the ability to zoom in a crop the field of view to focus on only one area for monitoring, and six hours of free event video history (up from three hours).

All of these features are accessible in the redesigned Google Home app that’s simpler, faster, and more stable. You can still use the Nest app, but Google tells Gizmodo that the Home app will be the primary smart home app for Nest devices moving forward. It’s only a matter of time before the Nest app is phased out sometime in the future, so don’t get too attached. The good news is, the new Google Home app has reached feature parity and stability with the Nest app. So, if the smart home app has left a bad taste in your mouth, like it has with me, I think we should give it another shot and then judge it.

I’ve not seen any of the new Nest Cameras in action, so I can’t say with what degree of accuracy Gemini is able to recognize people, vehicles, animals, packages, and other objects within footage in and around the home. But I’m hella interested in seeing how well the Ask Home feature works. I’d love to know which one of my two cats knocked over certain things in my apartment while I was at the office.

For the budget-conscious

The new Nest smart home products are feature-packed, but if you have a tighter budget—like a lot tighter—you may want to consider some of Walmart’s new Onn-branded devices like the $23 Indoor Camera Wired and the $50 Video Doorbell Wired. These aren’t comparable to the Nest Indoor Camera and Nest Doorbell—they only record 1080p, and the field of view isn’t as wide—but it does provide a more basic security camera system that integrates nicely with the new Google Home app. If you want the Gemini features like intelligent alerts and event history, you’ll need to pony up for a Google Home Premium subscription, which is split into Standard ($10) and Advanced ($20) plans.