Brady Snyder / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The Google Home app is being updated with a new and improved camera UI, among other changes.
- Users on Reddit report usability issues with Google Home’s camera controls on the web; it’s unclear if the issues are related to this week’s updates.
Google’s rolling out an update for the Google Home app that should improve the smart home experience in a lot of little ways, specifically for users with cameras. Release notes for the latest Google Home update include improvements like simplified camera settings and search, as well as a new tool to fix certain offline device errors.
The update notes were published in a blog post this week. The headlining improvement is a “modernized” camera UI that includes dynamic theming, as well as AI-generated event descriptions on the camera event timeline for Google Home Premium subscribers on the Advanced plan.
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Other improvements to the camera experience include AI descriptions of video events that should be more concise (without “unnecessary clutter”) and search results loading quicker in the Ask Home interface. Camera settings have also been reorganized, with some features — Gemini for Home, familiar face detection — easier to find.
Google’s also added prompts to the pages of third-party devices that aren’t responding because links between accounts have expired, ideally providing a quick and easy fix to an often annoying to diagnose issue.
Finally, the media control UI in the Google Home app has been updated to more prominently feature album art when playing music.
User reports on Reddit this week mention that the web view of Google Home-connected cameras isn’t working correctly, with camera feeds going unresponsive or switching back and forth between online and offline statuses. It’s not clear whether this unusual behavior is related to this week’s Home app updates.
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