“A small rodent, chipmunk, and hamster were noted on a blue rug at various times throughout the day, often near the cats.” This isn’t the beginning of a children’s picture book. It’s a summary by Google Gemini about everything that supposedly went on in my living room last week.

Only, there was no rodent. Or cats, plural. I also don’t have the dog that Gemini spots almost daily. This isn’t TikTok, and I’m not Snow White.

Earlier this year Google announced that its AI, named Gemini, would become part of all of its smart-home products. Already Gemini has been added to Google’s Nest security cameras, and I’ve been testing it for three weeks in the recently released Google Nest Cam Indoor (Wired, 3rd Gen), the Google Nest Cam Outdoor (Wired, 2nd Gen), and the Google Nest Doorbell (Wired, 3rd Gen).

Experiencing a new level of intensely close monitoring — and the AI-hallucination chaos that ended up snowballing — left me slightly creeped out. And I’m more than a little annoyed that Google seems to expect me, and other camera owners, to do the hard work of training Gemini, while paying for my own labor.

What Gemini is supposed to do


Google Home

The promise of Gemini, according to Google, will be felt across the smart home, as it brings more natural and conversational voice interactions with smart speakers, fluid integration with other smart devices, and new features such as annotated descriptions and notifications for video recordings and the ability to use text or voice searches to locate specific details in video recordings.

What it’s actually like to use Gemini for Home


Google Home

I installed the Google Nest Cam Outdoor (Wired, 2nd Gen) outside facing my driveway, and I put the Google Nest Cam Indoor (Wired, 3rd Gen) in my living room. I placed an older indoor Google Nest camera (which also received a Gemini boost) in my kitchen.

I enabled Familiar Face alerts (an optional facial-recognition feature) and then also opted in to an early release of Gemini for Home, as well as a $20-per-month Advanced subscription (you do that part online), which adds AI-generated descriptions to smartphone notifications of video events, annotations of the action in the videos, the daily Home Brief, and the option to perform an Ask Home video search.

Some good news: Automations work pretty well. Using the microphone icon on the Ask Home bar in the app, I told Gemini: “Every time someone walks in front of the living room camera after 6:00 p.m., turn on the deck lights.” It created the task but still required a few manual clicks, and you can’t delete or disable automations via Gemini yet. Overall, though, the experience is an improvement on a platform that always seemed wonky, and it did work.

Less happy news: When it comes to Gemini’s AI powers of observation, there’s still a lot of hard work to be done. Things quickly went from being invasive but slightly boring to overwhelming and completely bananas.

What Gemini for Home identified (and misidentified)


Google Home

On the first day, the results were fairly typical but also a bit TMI. With pre-Gemini Nest cameras, motion would trigger a basic smartphone alert like “Person detected.” With the new camera, I immediately got a more detailed description with Gemini’s interpreted context (“Person walks into the room.”) Since I had enabled Familiar Face detection and labeled my family’s faces, notifications instantly became more specific, like “Rachel walks downstairs.”

Gemini was just getting warmed up.

Within a day descriptions continued to add detail: “Person drinks water in the kitchen,” “cat jumps on couch,” or “cat plays with toy.”

With three cameras inside and outside my home, I was soon on the receiving end of a firehose of alerts: when items were tossed in the trash cans, when delivery people arrived, and when my cat groomed himself on top of my couch.

For giggles I threw on a disguise to see what would happen, and Gemini impressively and accurately described the event as “A person wearing a cat mask and a black shirt walks into the room.”

Over just a couple of days of use, Gemini sent me dozens of banal descriptions about my household. But soon the hallucinations kicked in. Gemini notified me that our cat was scratching the couch and also that my husband was walking into the room, but a look at the footage showed that Kitty was innocent of the crime, and my husband was nowhere to be seen. Then there were descriptions that my husband and I were relaxing “along with others,” though unless Gemini is able to see poltergeists, we were the only two in the house.


Google Home

Afterward, Gemini perceived my definitely orange cat as being several other colors, which made the AI assume I had a multitude of cats. And then Gemini insisted I had a dog, as well as a chipmunk, a hamster, and mice — oh, lots of mice. To Gemini’s mind, we were infested. This came as a great surprise to us (not least of all our cat).

The Google Home app allows you to provide feedback on each video clip to improve accuracy, but only through the not-very-scientific thumbs-up/thumbs-down model. Over the course of three weeks, my cameras captured an average of 300 events on any given day. I can’t imagine anyone having the time or patience to keep up with that.

Why Gemini for Home makes security cameras less secure


Google Home

Although this whole experience was a source of entertainment for my co-workers and me, it quickly turned to concern. Security cameras aren’t supposed to be funny or entertaining. They’re safety devices tasked with protecting people and their possessions.

People rely on cameras to be unbiased observers, but the addition of AI that interprets what it sees introduces bias — and if it’s inaccurate, it’s no longer useful. Gemini for Home, in its current form, is plagued by AI hallucinations, constantly prone to mislabeling people, colors, activities, objects, and animals, and that makes it fundamentally untrustworthy. And the less you trust your security device, the less you rely on it, even when you absolutely should.

We weren’t the only ones having experiences like this. (As I write this, my Nest camera just labeled my 6-foot-3 husband as a child and claimed that his armful of laundry was a baby.)

At best, Google’s Gemini for Home is a rough beta program that’s unfocused and unreliable — and that makes it potentially dangerous when implemented on a security device.

A Google spokesperson told us: “Gemini for Home (including AI descriptions, Home Brief, and Ask Home) is in early access, so users can try these new features and continue giving us feedback as we work to perfect the experience. As part of this, we are investing heavily in improving accurate identification. This includes incorporating user-provided corrections to generate more accurate AI descriptions. Since all Gemini for Home features rely on our underlying Familiar Faces identification, improving this accuracy also means improving the quality of Familiar Faces. This is an active area of investment and we expect these features to keep improving over time.”

We’ll continue to test Gemini for Home, but for now we can’t recommend it to anyone who relies on these cameras for security or peace of mind.

This article was edited by Jon Chase and Grant Clauser.