We ask Gemini and Alexa to track cats and give advice

For better or worse, Amazon Alexa and Google Home's smart voice assistants have been imbued with the powers of generative AI. The promise is that you can use natural language with your smart speaker to adjust your thermostat, lock the doors, and find out what your pets have been up to. The reality is smart home voice assistants seem to be going through an identity crisis. Senior reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy invites Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel onto his own podcast to compare notes on life with Alexa Plus vs. Gemini for Home. Further reading: ⁠GTA VI keeps leaking ahead of its gameplay premiere⁠ ⁠I bought DJI’s banned camera — it was cheap and easy⁠ ⁠Does giving a camera wings dodge the FCC’s drone ban?⁠ ⁠Meta glasses are a workplace menace⁠ ⁠Google’s Pet Memory forgot who my cats are⁠ ⁠I tasked Alexa Plus with tackling my to-do list — it was hit or miss⁠ ⁠With Alexa Plus, Amazon finally reinvents its best product⁠ ⁠How AI broke the smart home in 2025⁠ ⁠I let Gemini watch my family for the weekend — it got weird⁠ ⁠Google built a great smart speaker, but Gemini isn’t ready for it⁠ ⁠Jony Ive’s first OpenAI gadget is reportedly a hockey puck-sized smart speaker⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of smart home voice assistants. I'm Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, and on today's show, Neelai joins me, and we're going to review Gemini for Home and Alexa Plus. Generative AI promised a revolution for smart speakers, smarter, more capable in-home voice assistants that can understand natural language, pass complicated commands, and run your smart home for you. What more could you want? A year into this revolution, are we any better off? But first, a look at everything that's happening on the verge today.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  This is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Thursday, August 20, 2026. Grand Theft Auto VI, the most hotly anticipated video game since Grand Theft Auto V, is leaking. Yesterday, three clips of apparent game footage appeared online, and today we reported on a new clip from the group called Cyberleak that shows footage of Dival shooting the word "leak" into the wall. This could mean an actual copy of the game has escaped Rotstar's containment. If you can't wait till the November release, there's an extended look coming to Netflix next week. Spoiler alert: you steal cars and kill people. Surprise, people are getting around the FCC's import ban on new gadgets from DJI. The Verge's Sean Hollister bought an Osmo Pocket 4 for $659 from Timu and

• 1:21Speaker 00

  got it in four days from Oregon. It's not DJI selling it, however. It appears third parties are getting gadgets from China to feed the demand. Other companies are getting creative to get around the ban. Drone maker Hover Air just got its new Verge certified by calling it a camera that flies rather than a drone. The FCC is so on it. Retail and service workers are fed up of your Meta glasses and don't want to be in your TikToks. The Verge's Mia Sutter reports how public-facing workers have been filmed, harassed, and creeped out by AI-powered glasses, and because it's their job, they can't just walk away. US law offers little help. Public recording is broadly legal, and workplace protection is left a corporate policy, so you may start seeing

• 2:04Speaker 00

  no recording signs popping up at your local Target sooner than you think. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on the Verge for Thursday, August 20, 2026.

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• 3:17Speaker 00

  Hello, welcome back. I have a very special guest with me. Neelai, thank you so much for agreeing to be on your podcast with me.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  It was a big lift, but I'm doing it.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  So just to kind of start off, we're just gonna refresh everyone's memory in case they aren't, they don't remember what's going on with these smart voice assistants. We've got Amazon's Alexa Plus, which is their new generative AI voice assistant that replaced regular Alexa, and we have Gemini for Home, which is Google's new Google Assistant. They've actually completely removed Google Assistant.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  I want to be clear, I don't 100% believe that they've completely removed Google Assistant.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  You don't? You think it's, yeah, it's still lurking in there in the background.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  We'll get into it. I just, I just want to say this conspiracy theory out loud at the top of the episode.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  And one other thing we should say at the top of the episode is we are probably going to be using those words, Alexa and Hey Google, a number of times. So if you are in your house, in your kitchen, where you've got smart speakers, you might want to mute them, just to prevent us doing weird and wild things in your home.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're gonna open enclosure shades so many times.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  That's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Excellent. All right. So off the top, you use Google Assistant in your home. Is that right? What's, what's your experience to date sort of been between using Google Assistant and then the new Gemini for Home? And yeah, tell us a little bit how that experience has gone for you.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say we are a Google Home family, not because of the merits of the voice assistant, but because of the Google Photos integration and the, you know, the Google Home display devices, they have really excellent color temperature sensors in them, so the photo displays look reflective. And this was their core innovation 100 years ago. They have done nothing else since, but it makes photos look really good in your kitchen. So this is why we are a Google Home family. And when it was Google Assistant and regular Alexa, setting timers and playing music, they were on par experiences. I think it really did not matter. So we picked one ecosystem solely on the basis of

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Google Photos integration. Now, I think it's very different, because you have these AI assistants over the top. And the reason I say I, my conspiracy theory is Google Assistant is still there, is Gemini for Home is notably worse and slower at controlling smart home devices. You can just tell. And from my perspective, I can't say that I know this is true. It really feels like Gemini for Home is just issuing commands to standard Google Assistant. Like, they didn't rebuild that backend. It's just there, and you ask it to turn on the lights, and then it says to Google Assistant, turn on the lights, because it's so slow. And that's why I believe it's there. And then every now

• 6:06Speaker 03

  and again, I don't know if you've had this experience, Google Assistant will just answer me.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  It'll just reappear out of the ether. And I'm like, oh, you were here the whole time. Why can't I just talk to you to turn on the lights on and off? So there's just something very complicated architecturally about how Gemini for Home works that makes me often miss Google Assistant, because Google Assistant was many things. It was not perfect, but at least it was fast, and at least it was predictable. Not perfectly predictable, but predict, in the way that smart home voice assistants are predictable. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was predictable.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  It largely did what you asked it to most of the time, if you asked it in the right way. That was the key kind of difference.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  So, but this is the promise. I'm curious for your perspective on Alexa, because the promise of all this AI is that, I mean, just think about what you just said. It largely did what you said most of the time. It's like, not great. And the, the promise of AI is you'll be able to say whatever you want. And if there's one thing AI is good at, it's understanding language, and then it will figure it out. And I would say, we can talk about the whole scheme of things. Gemini has improved some parts of that, but the smart home pieces are as clunky as ever.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  And I think this comes to like, one of the core problems here. And I think you, I think your theory really does probably hold a lot of weight, because there is this piecing together of voice, well, of models. They, I mean, we know that they're, both of these companies are using different models to do different things. And one of the things I've learned since I've been working with these assistants and talking to experts in the space, is that most of the generative AI voice assistants are not going to be able to do the same thing every time. That's almost the whole point of, well, it is the whole point of generative AI. They're more creative. It's non-deterministic,

• 8:03Speaker 00

  right? You're, you're asked, every time you ask ChatGPT a question, if you ask the same question three times, you're likely to get three different answers. And when I ask my smart home to turn on the lights three times, I want it to do that three times. I don't want it to go and, okay, I'm gonna change your thermostat instead, because it sounded more fun. And it seems like that is a kind of core friction with the smart home voice assistants. And I think it gets to what we want as users of these assistants. Like, we're used to an assistant that just does what we tell it to, albeit perhaps not always exactly how we want, because we've said it wrong. Like, one core example I

• 8:44Speaker 00

  have is with Google, because I do use Google sometimes. So Amazon Alexa is my primary voice assistant in the home, but I've, obviously, I try them all. And I asked Google Home to turn on my living room TV, which is a Chromecast, Google streamer, and play YouTube TV. 50% of the time, no problem. The other 50% of the time, I cannot do that. I cannot control smart home devices in your home. That is not within my capabilities. It's like, you don't know what you're capable of. And like, there's this fundamental disconnect there, and that's what's made it, the experience frustrating. But I have had good experiences.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  I have an even dumber example for you.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  It's very bad. So in the, you know, in Google Home and Apple Home and all the smart home ecosystems, this room that I'm sitting in is labeled Neelai's office.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  So everyone knows.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  It's what it is. It's mine. You can't have it. Get out of here, children. And often I say, hey, turn on the lights in my office. And it does not know, even, even though it's my account with my name on it, it cannot make the leap to the room Neelai's office belonging to me.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Which, you know, I have a one-year-old. The one-year-old's brain can identify which objects belong to him, right? Like, there's something that's not intelligent about the intelligent systems, where these little leaps you need to make them responsive to just wide amounts of input, do not exist. And so you still have to say something very stilted to get to what you want. You have to say, turn on the lights in Neelai's office, which is just a fundamentally crazy thing to say out loud about your own space that you are currently sitting in, named after you.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  And yet, I do it all the time.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's what that was the promise, right? With this more ambient, interactive smart home that you don't have to like read a manual in order to be able to control. And to your point earlier about how Google seems to have sort of pieced things together here, one of the interesting things that I found differences between Alexa Plus and Gemini for Home is that you can talk to Alexa Plus back and forth like you can with a chatbot to some extent, but for Gemini for Home, you have to then ask to speak to Gemini Live. And they've like, they've distinguished these two different sides of how you control or how you use the Google Assistant Gemini for Home in your home. You still call it, hey, Google, oh, my gosh, Google, come on with the naming.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  It's like, hey, Google, Google Assistant, Gemini for Home, Google Home. So I'm going around in circles with it, but that, this is where it gets confusing. And it seems fundamentally a bad consumer experience to say, okay, we're giving you these tools, but you have to use certain nomenclature to get one side of the experience versus just the being able to talk back and forth with Google Assistant without having to say, hey, Google, which is another frustrating experience, I find, having to constantly repeat the wake word. Whereas Alexa has, to its credit, managed to mesh all of this into one experience. And over the, I've been testing Alexa Plus for about a year now, which seems crazy.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  And when it launched, I had a lot of problems and I have seen significant improvements, but there's one really clear distinction between the two is that Alexa is always trying to sell me things. And that I have found almost enough to make me not want to use it anymore.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Does it, it's like a hard sell? Is it like, do you need more tires?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  So, so a good example, I was trying Gemini Live and Alexa's conversational experience. And I, my son just went to college. So I was like, I want to get some parental advice from my AI because you know, who shouldn't ask AI for parental advice? I mean, I was trying, I obviously not planning on taking their advice, but I was interested to see what they said. Hey, Google, let's chat. Hey, I dropped my son off for his freshman year at college last week. Any tips for how to manage this?

• 12:58Speaker 04

  You might want to try setting a weekly rhythm for deeper calls while keeping texts casual and low pressure. Try to listen more than you advise, asking him how he plans to handle things rather than offering immediate solutions.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Alexa, I dropped my son off for his freshman year at college last week. Do you have any tips for what I should do to help him while he's away?

• 13:20Speaker 05

  The key is finding that sweet spot between being supportive and giving him space to grow. Be available when he calls, but resist the urge to check in constantly. Send care packages occasionally. Maybe with some of those school supplies, you're great at picking out.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  You've got to be kidding me. That's very good. You know, some poor Alexa AI engineer had to like hard code those prompts into the system prompt.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  So, yeah, that, that's, and you know, this is the payoff. And I know you've talked about this a lot on the Vergecast, like, you know, you're the product. We are paying for these devices, for these experiences in, in many ways, but if, but we're also still feeding these AIs, these smart home assistants with our information and they're using it to make money in some way. Or, you know, we're still waiting to see exactly what Google Home and Gemini Live is going to do here, but Amazon Alexa, clearly they're, they're always trying to sell you something. And there are ads on every single Echo Show screen that I own now, which is infuriating.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I find, I find like Amazon's Alexa Plus has done a better job of transitioning from the old commander control deterministic voice assistant into the generative AI, more free flowing conversational device, but it's also lost its purpose in my home in the process, I feel, because it's doing things like that that I don't want. So I don't find I'm using those experiences because I don't like those interactions. And then when I want it to do something simple, I can't always rely on it to do it.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Amazon just has a totally different revenue model. I think they have a better product person in Panos Penne, who wants the products to work better and is insistent they, they work better. And he's been on this show and he's very familiar to the audience. I've talked to him a lot. He wants the products to be good.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  It's very clear he'd like the products to be good. And then he's got a bolt on a revenue model in which Amazon makes the vast majority of its money, not by doing web searches or selling advertising, but by getting you to buy stuff on Amazon. And that degrades the experience in a very specific way.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  And the, I, I think they're just running in totally different directions at the same goal, which is you will have one AI that follows you around all the time, that knows everything about you and is helping you do a bunch of stuff. And they're nowhere close to these things.

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• 17:56Speaker 00

  What was some of your good experiences slash bad experiences when we, with, with a few of these scenarios that we tried? Did you, was there any that kind of jumped out at you?

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Uh, you put together a few. The one that jumped out to me that just worked and would not have worked in the past is stacking commands that are, that they're able to do. So I need to set a timer for this, that, and the other thing. Google Home can just do it and it does it without complaint. That's pretty good. Sometimes multi-step smart home control works, close the shades, turn on the lights, do a third thing. It's very slow. It's so slow that you almost believe it's not going to work and you wish the command twice. And that's, again, my belief that it's just prompting Google Assistant in the background and waiting to see what happens in return and then it updates. But it does work.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  So just being able to chain commands and let them happen is a distinct upgrade, I think, from the classic assistants. Everything else is pretty medium, in my opinion.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  I think chaining commands and also being able to use more natural language, like, I think we have a couple of videos here of, of trying these. Alexa, it's too dark in the living room and I'm cold. And can you lock the door?

• 19:10Speaker 05

  I brightened the living room lights, raised both thermostats a couple of degrees and locked the front door.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Hey, Google, it's dark in here and I'm too hot and I think I left the door unlocked.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  I've turned on the lights and set the thermostats to cool, but some devices are offline and I need a code for the airlock. Please say the code for the airlock.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  We did speed things up a little bit, just to Neelai's point, they are really slow.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Very slow.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  This is one of the biggest complaints I think I've seen from users all around is that since we've moved to these new, new fangled LLM powered voice assistants, speed has taken a huge hit. There are a few times when things are fast because of both Google Assistant, Gemini for Home on your Google Smart display does have some local control and Amazon Alexa, some, some of them have local control. So occasionally like turn on the lights will be fast, but in general, especially these chaining of commands or using more, like, for example, like make it warmer in here and turn down the lights, it takes much longer to process. And yeah, that is frustrating because it used to be better and now it's worse.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  So, yeah, that was one. It's like they giveth and then they take it away.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  I find the calendar management one that I really like because it's something to be able to do with your voice, like, oh, you know, tell me what's on my schedule today. That's really useful. Alexa does a much better job with that, which is surprising because Google is the calendar. Google is my calendar, but it talks, it says, hey, this is what you've got going on today. Whereas Google does this, you have a orthodontist appointment at 4:30, you have pick up your daughter at, whereas Alexa's like, hey, yeah, you're going to be picking up your daughter at four, you've got this appointment. It's more conversational and easier to listen to and less frustrating. Alexa, what have I got on today?

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Let me check. You've got your dermatologist appointment at 2:45 PM, then picking up Rose at 4:00 PM and yoga at 7:00 PM.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Hey, Google, what have I got on today?

• 21:18Speaker 04

  You have four events today. Take the car in at 12:00 PM, dermatologist Jen at 2:45 PM, collect Rose from the bus stop at 4:00 PM, and yoga at 7:00 PM.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  But biggest problem, can't add my work calendar to either of them. So that's useless to me because that's most of my day.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's funny because our work calendars are in Google, we're a Google Workspace company.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  This should be very easy. Google account management is a problem so longstanding that I think even the most advanced frontier AI can't solve it.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Nothing is going to solve that, no.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  No one has ever been able to solve it. I find that the live chat function on Google is so comically broken as to be useless. And it works in two different ways. So they just added a feature where it just starts listening again after a regular command. So you say, turn on the lights, it just keeps listening. And that's kind of interesting. And then, you know, because you can just keep talking to it.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Right. You don't have to keep saying, hey, hey, G.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  You don't have to, yeah, you don't have to just keep saying the wake word over and over again. And that is Gemini for home.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  I'm making a very clear distinction here. Then you can say, hey, G, let's chat. And that opens Gemini Live, which is a different system. And that is so broken as to be useless. And it makes me wonder if anyone at Google has even tried it since it launched.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Hey, Google, let's chat.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Before we start, keep in mind Gemini responses can have mistakes sometimes, so be sure to double check them.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  So what it does for me is it just feeds back to itself consistently. And it's Gemini, it's like proper Gemini, not this cut down Gemini for home. So you should be able to ask it almost anything and get a Gemini style response. So I just asked it if Brendan Carr's dummy has a theme song. And it, one, it got it wrong. And then I asked it to double check and it got it confidently wrong again. So this is already a fail. But then it was listening to itself and it just started asking and answering its own questions about podcast production. We have the clip, we don't have to overdo it because it was, it took a long time.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  It just kept going.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  It just kept going. Does the Vergecast have custom theme music for this segment, Brendan Carr's dummy?

• 23:39Speaker 04

  The Vergecast does not have custom theme music for that segment. It is just a recurring bit in their discussion. Would you, the Vergecast does not use custom music for specific segments like those.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  You're 100% sure there's not custom music for that segment?

• 23:54Speaker 04

  You are correct. That segment does not have its own custom theme music, as the show typically maintains a consistent musical tone throughout each episode. Since we've been discussing podcast production, would you like to know how they choose music for other parts of their show? Podcast post-production involves several key steps to ensure a professional sound.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  What's good about Alexa Plus now is that it's better than it used to be. But the confidently wrong things, like I had a whole conversation with it about a World Cup game this summer, and it insisted that the game was tomorrow, but it was today. And it didn't matter how many times I told it it was wrong, it kept insisting it was right. And this is, this is what's fundamentally broken for a device in your home. It's so different when you're sitting at a computer and you can just, you know, use different reference points. But if you're walking around your home trying to do something hands-free, you need it to get it right. And that I have found really frustrating in this experience.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Because I, I can see some value here, but it's, it's just like, just not reachable. And do you think any of the incomers might be able to fix this? Do you think Apple has sort of got a magic wand up its sleeve here? Or, or OpenAI is suddenly going to bring us a smart speaker that actually works and does everything? And you feel like that's, that's the potential down the line? Or do you think Amazon and Google could eventually get this right?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  I don't know if any of them can get it right. If you really think about what we're describing here is a central voice assistant for control of many things that needs to connect to a huge and wildly disparate set of control systems and databases.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  And that's a very nerdy Vergecasty way of thinking about it. But all I'm saying is you have a voice control system that needs to understand everything you're saying and decide whether you are asking it to play Fleetwood Mac on your network connected speakers, or just talk about Stevie Nicks as a character, or book Stevie Nicks tickets and use an agentic system to go buy tickets to the show that might be around you and then put that on your calendar. That's a lot of different things. And the pathways to accomplish all of those goals are incredibly different. They require incredibly different systems. It's clear, at least from my experience with Google, they require incredibly different

• 26:24Speaker 03

  resolutions to patent lawsuits and deal making, right? Like, there's just a bunch of barriers that aren't strictly technological in the way. And then there are some pretty high technological barriers. So Apple, I think, is a really good example. Siri exists, HomePod exists. Lots and lots of people are in the HomeKit ecosystem. I would venture to guess more people are in the HomeKit ecosystem in an even, even like half toe in way than are in the Google Home ecosystem or the Alexa ecosystem, right? Because it's just there. If you have one smart light bulb in your house, you're in the HomeKit ecosystem, right? Like, it's just, it's just there in a very particular way on people's iPhones. Okay,

• 27:05Speaker 03

  that means some of that is built out. But then they've got to put a Siri-based AI in a device, it's got to understand who all the people in your home are, which Siri is very bad at today, and no HomePod can do that today. They have got to connect Siri to all the things that Siri is not good at, right? Booking concert tickets and managing calendars that don't belong to you because you actually have a Google Calendar and not an iCloud Calendar, all this stuff that Apple isn't good at. And then they've got to make it work 100% of the time because that's Apple. And if it doesn't work 100% of the time, this is very bad. This is all already hard. I'm on the beta of iOS 27, and degradation in Siri, just in the smart home context, already is that you can no

• 27:48Speaker 03

  longer simply say scenes to it if the scenes sound like something you would say to a person. So I have a scene in my house called Good Night, which just locks all the doors and turns off all the light. And I would say 70% of the time on iOS 27 beta, I do what I do every single day, and I say, I click the Siri button, I say, good night, which should just trigger that scene. And 75% of the time Siri says, you have a good night too. And I don't need it to do that.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  This is, and this is the new Siri, right? This is, yes.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Siri AI, right? And it's like, I, no, I need to do the thing that I was doing for years before this, which is just turn off the lights and lock the door by issuing the name of a scene. And now the command is locked. So this is like a problem for Apple. Like, they might have a lead in just smart home platform adoption. Not 100% sure, but Sony people with iPhones have HomeKit floating around, right? Like, and Google Home is just a nightmare. Like, this is basically my argument. On the other side, all the other stuff doesn't quite exist yet. If you look at OpenAI, the idea that Johnny Ive is going to design an OpenAI device that can do smart home control necessarily implies someone at OpenAI

• 28:58Speaker 03

  has been tasked with build out an entire smart home control platform. You figure out matter, OpenAI.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Have fun.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  It just doesn't seem likely to me. In big and important ways, that seems insurmountable, even if OpenAI's agentic capabilities or, you know, ability to go use a web browser on your behalf or write code for you, they're more willing to write code for you are far superior to what the other companies are doing. So I just look at, you got to put all the puzzle pieces together. And there are reasons for all of these companies to have two, but not five. Right? To be really good, like to be mediocre at five, but great at nothing. Or in the, I think in the case of OpenAI, to maybe be great at one and like nowhere on the other four, assuming you think there are five puzzle pieces.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  It just, some of this seems too hard to bite the whole thing at once.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Success here, to me, feels like the whole thing at once.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  And I guess the question comes down, I think there are two things here that I'm still trying to wrap my head around and decide what I want to see. The first is, do I want all five? Or am I happy to have one that can do two and a half and another that can do two and a half? Like, I feel like the home is such a large, complicated beast that having a dedicated system that can run my home and perhaps have some element of orchestration for the people in it. Then my personal assistant that I use on my phone, does that need to be interconnected? Like, that, that's what I always thought. It's great to have it all together. But in my experience with these devices that have been trying that, it's, it's not been great.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Well, again, the, the promise is everything.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  And, and none of these companies are shy about everything.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  And I just don't know that anyone's ever really going to be able to do it. I think we will have much better success if they lean in, like, Amazon should lean in on what it is good at. Google should lean in on what it is good at. And I think one area I've seen both Google and Amazon do well, and I think we know that Apple is looking to get into this space too, is, uh, security cameras. Because this is what's going to feed into our AI-powered homes if we want that ambient experience, right? Because cameras can tell you what's going on in a home. But it's really the only way to get that experience.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  It's, it's not, I mean, having cameras inside your home, I think, is not something that people want. But if you have cameras outside your home at your door, it can feed so much information as to what's happening in the home. And we've seen it happen. We've seen both Ring and Nest. That, that's the one area I've seen substantial improvement. And like, I can query both of them and ask them to show me the last time they saw my cat. Alexa, when did you last see my cat?

• 32:02Speaker 05

  The last time I saw your cat was yesterday, August 16th. I spotted your feline friend several times over the past week, mostly around the front door area.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Hey, Google, when did you last see my cat?

• 32:14Speaker 04

  Smokey was last seen today at 5:56 a.m., eating from a bowl in the laundry room.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Google can even tell me which cat. Well, hmm, it says it can. All of my cats are one cat, according to it, because it can't distinguish between the three. I've written an article about that that's on the site this week, if you want to read more about that. But that, so if, I feel like that's where we're moving towards when it comes to the home and this, uh, you know, the next level of experience is this ambient, your home actually knows what's happening and can react proactively for you. Do we want that? Is it going to work well? Hmm, big question marks, but that feels like where we're moving. And Apple has talked about that too. I mean, we, Apple, there's rumors about Apple bringing cameras to the home as well.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  And, and they keep sort of steadily increasing the way cameras can get in a home kit?

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Yes, and there's a lot, iOS 27 brings these AI-powered descriptions to homekit cameras, which I've been testing. And that's really interesting because it can say, oh, Jennifer's in the backyard or Jennifer just came home. And you can see that the next step is, it knows where everyone is without having to use your phones, because your phone might be, might be dead when you walk in the door and so it doesn't know you came home. So yeah, there's, there's a friction there. It's like, is that what we want? Is that the next level?

• 33:38Speaker 03

  I mean, the, do we want cameras around every house in America? Speeding, training data AI systems, I think, bigger than this podcast, probably. Um, but there's a real gap there because we have no, we have a no cameras in the house policy.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  So even the baby monitor is a closed RF system. It's ancient, it's dying. And I, I'm very sad if it ever does die because finding another closed RF system is hard. They all have Wi-Fi in them now. Um, but no cameras now, so only cameras outside of the house. And they still don't know everything, right? But it's, it's enough to make the system think it's smarter than it really is in a way that here's where all the people are outside the house feels like meaningful information. But if you've got two little kids and everyone's in and around the house, it's actually no information at all.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  It's, the kids are outside. Great. Like, I knew that already. And so being able to take the next action based on that is important. And that means you've got to connect it to a bunch of other information that these systems may or may not have, that you may, may or may not want them to have. Uh, I'll give you a really, really done example from this past weekend. Uh, my wife was traveling, I was home with the kids, it was late at night. I gave the baby his last bottle for the night. I realized we had no milk for the morning. Said to the eight-year-old, watch this baby, the baby's asleep, don't light the house on fire. The grocery store is a block away. I'm just going to go get the milk and come back. And we got the alerts on our phones and my wife from Denver said, where did you go?

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Where are you going? And I was like, I should have been like, the bar, like, whatever it was. I'm out. Like, Max has got it. Um, I was like, no, I just need a milk round. I came back. Now, there's a world in which we have a smart fridge and the smart fridge knows we're out of milk and it had already ordered it. There's also a world in which we have a smart fridge and the camera system saw me leave the front door and it assessed why I would be leaving and it told my wife in Denver, don't worry.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Don't worry. He's not abandoned your children?

• 35:44Speaker 03

  This is all crazy. Like, I don't want computers to know this much information about me.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  And even the fact that I had walked down the street to buy a gallon of milk and walked back within 10 minutes, the fact that I got a text message about it was like an uncomfortable level of surveillance.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Already know too much about me.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  And by the way, the funniest part about this is because it's all disparate systems, it didn't occur to her that she could have just opened Find My on our phones and saw exactly where I had gone.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Right? Because I don't, we just have it turned on. And all of this, I was just thinking about it, this is an incredible swirl of data that if you connect, creates the surveillance nightmare that is probably a, a different episode of the show. But we should acknowledge surveillance nightmare exists here. But it's also, would that be useful? Is that actually information or is it just noise?

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  And are we, are we kind of mistaking all this noise that our smart home sensors can generate for meaningful information?

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Well, and I think the answer to that comes when one company figures out the best way to bring all of that noise and make it actionable and useful and give a value proposition. Because right now, they're not fast, they're not reliable, and there isn't an obvious value to these smart home assistants in the way that there was when we first got this. We've, we can turn the lights on and off with our voice. That was a great value proposition. Um, but this next level, now that we've been asked to pay for it, both of these services require, um, $20 a month subscriptions or Prime membership. Gemini for Home has tiers, but you're being asked to pay for it when we weren't before.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  And I feel like we're still waiting for that value proposition. And if one company, maybe Apple, maybe OpenAI, can come in and give us a value proposition here, I feel like, I, I, I'm excited. I would be excited if someone can do that. I'm not deeply optimistic that it's going to happen, but I am pleased because right now I can tell you that both of these smart assistants can set three timers

• 37:55Speaker 00

  at once. And now, okay, that's progress, right, Neelai?

• 38:00Speaker 05

  Potatoes for 25, steak for seven, frozen pizza for 12, and wine reminder in 30.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Sure, timer set for 20 minutes for potatoes. Sure, timer set for seven minutes for steak. Sure, timer set for 12 minutes for pizza. Sure, creating, take the wine out of the fridge for 7:35 p.m.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's a big win. We'll see if, you know, Apple got to two. Uh, with Siri, it took them a decade. We'll see if they can chain together three with this next turn.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  We will see. We will come back once, uh, Apple has, has done something with Apple Home and Siri. Because right now you can't really use Siri, the new Siri, as you've demonstrated, to control your smart home. So I'm, it will be interesting to see where that goes and if OpenAI, OpenAI comes up with something great in the smart home space too. So I, can, will you come back and we can talk about it?

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I'm dying to know. Again, the idea that there's somebody at OpenAI who's sitting there with the matter specification every day and being like, you want me to do what? Like, it just seems very obvious that they will not engage with the smart home. Because if you, that's just a rabbit hole of disaster for them.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  It feels like both Google and Amazon are trying to get out of the smart home, honestly.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Honestly, that's what it feels like to me. But yeah, yeah. Oh, well, thank you, Neelai, for joining me on your show.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Um, and yes, I will, we will have to come back and chat more about this.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. We're, we're in for quite a run between Apple and OpenAI. We're, many more episodes of this are coming.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Excellent. Great. That's it for The Vergecast. Remember to subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and more. We love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or call the hotline at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show was produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Bye.

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