Gemini for Home’s daily briefings are getting spooky, users say
Strangers in black coats creep around the front door, phantom rodents scurrying through the garden, threatening the figures with black bags and hammers. Are you still afraid?
These are just a few of the things Google’s Gemini has reported in its Home Briefs — the summaries it can produce of daily events detected by Nest security cameras and other connected smart home devices — and some Gemini for Home users say they’re completely freaked out by the briefings, especially as Halloween approaches.
“Throughout the morning, several instances of people wearing black coats or dresses were observed standing in the yard,” reads a Home Brief screenshot posted by a Google Home user on Reddit. “The unusual presence of individuals dressed in black coats or dresses continued into the afternoon, with multiple sightings in the yard and approaching the driveway.”
Talk about a scary report, but the reality turned out to be pretty innocuous.
“This is hilarious, I received this summary today,” the user said. “For ‘black coats or dresses,’ I have Halloween decorations that the camera sees.”
The user admitted that the spooky description was more or less “accurate,” but that another event reported in the briefing (“a person was seen walking near the game in the backyard”) didn’t happen: “The person near the game doesn’t exist, the clip didn’t show anyone.” »
In a similar event, another Gemini for Home user posted a screenshot of a Home Brief report about someone “walking up the driveway with a black bag and a hammer.”
Again, scary, but nothing to be alarmed about. “We put out Halloween decorations yesterday,” the user wrote. “It looks like we are committing a horrible crime.”
Android Authority, which first reported Gemini’s scary Home Brief summaries, noted that many Gemini for Home users had good experiences with the daily summaries, calling them “perfect” and “pretty impressive,” while some of the Home Brief’s inaccuracies were quite minor: for example, a car that was “not a Tesla Model 3, it was a Toyota Corolla.”
But other Gemini for Home users claim their Gemini-powered Nest cameras have mistaken cats for raccoons (or the other way around), while one user said their Home Brief warned about a raccoon that apparently wasn’t there: “He said he couldn’t find the video. I said, ‘You’re the one who told me about that raccoon.’ He was saying something like ‘I know I said that, but there’s no video like this of the incident.’
We have contacted Google for comment.
Home Brief is a feature included in the $20 per month Google Home Advanced plan. Once enabled, Home Brief will generate a daily report of what Gemini for Home saw and detected around your smart home over the past 24 hours, including events captured by your Gemini-enabled Nest cameras. This feature is intended to give you a quick overview of daily activity without having to wade through a long list of individual smart home updates.
Google says it has gone to great lengths to ensure Gemini for Home’s reporting is accurate, while Google’s “Familiar Faces” feature can help identify or filter updates about the whereabouts of household members.
Still, it’s easy to imagine how the hallucinations common to most LLMs might seep into Google’s Home Brief summaries. (I’m still waiting for access to Gemini for Home.) This is probably why Google is taking its time with the Gemini for Home rollout. A new Google Home speaker, for example, was announced earlier this month, but it won’t ship until next spring.
This news is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.
