Google continues to revamp its smart home app and the latest change includes an update to the camera experience. Among other things, the company says it has refreshed the Google Home UI to enable faster navigation and smoother scrolling through videos, with the aim of giving you a broader overview of what your cameras are capturing.
For example, you will be able to filter and sort events based on factors such as “Person seen”, “Parcel seen”, “Glass broken heard”. Thumbnail previews are now animated and focus on subjects to make it easier to see at a glance what your camera has captured. The player window will remain visible while you scroll as well.
Those with an advanced Google Home Premium plan will be able to access event descriptions in the timeline view. This feature, along with enlarged thumbnail previews, will also be available for older Nest cameras.
Additionally, Google has updated its familiar face detection tools. You will be able to provide feedback on previews of familiar faces with a thumbs up or down to improve the accuracy of the feature. The app will filter out low-quality captures (including blurry and small faces) to clean up the face library.
There are also new camera controls, such as a handy option to rewind or forward event recordings in 10-second increments. You can swipe to switch between timeline and events, resize the video player by pulling the control bar down, and close the camera view by swiping down.
As you would expect, many of these features are powered by Gemini. On a related note, Google has updated Gemini for Home. People who signed up for the early access program are using a version powered by Gemini 3.1. So, according to Google, the updated voice assistant can now better handle multi-step commands. This means that you “can now combine different tasks, such as adding new items and updating existing lists in one breath.”
The company added that Gemini 3.1 makes it easier to identify similar list names to avoid creating duplicates, while you can expect easier alarm and calendar management thanks to improvements to the way Gemini handles recurring events throughout the day. Google said it “also fixed issues with AM/PM confusion when setting an alarm,” which seems like a pretty basic feature to have completely resolved.