Google Home app adds ‘Voice assistant experiments’ setting for Gemini

Abner Li | May 26 2025 - 7:30 am PT

We didn’t get a real update about Gemini on smart speakers and display at I/O 2025 last week, but Google Home recently added a new “Voice assistant experiments” setting for it.

Since testing got underway in December, those enrolled in the Google Home Public Preview with Nest Aware just had to enable “Experimental AI features” to “Google Assistant with help from Gemini.” That’s accessed by tapping the lab beaker icon in the top-right corner of the app.

Under the Settings tab in the Google Home app, there is a new “Voice assistant experiments” menu between Google Assistant and Presence Sensing. We’re only seeing it on Android and not iOS.

This lets you “Choose how people can access Assistant Experiments on all eligible devices in this home.” There’s a high-level setting to “Enable Assistant experiments in this home.” If enabled, your options are:

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Require Voice Match: Only adults who have set up Voice Match will have access
Everyone: Everyone, including guests and people who haven’t set up Voice Match, will have access

Top comment by John Burke (Lanhoj)

Liked by 11 people

Gemini does 3 things worse than Assistant that make me not want to switch to it:

Gemini announces when it's performing a Home control action instead of doing it silently
Gemini announces when it's setting a timer/alarm instead of doing it silently
Gemini fails to default my temperature unit to Celsius

Each of them I explicitly ask Gemini to do in the way that I want (example: "Do XYZ silently" or "Always tell me the weather in Celsius") but it either fails altogether at listening or it does it once, says it'll default to that behaviour but then forgets to on subsequent requests.

With Assistant on the other hand it works perfectly, so, since I don't use Gemini Live & Assistant does searches perfectly fine, I have no reason or desire to switch to Gemini until they fix those issues.

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At The Android Show: I/O Edition, Google said that the Gemini experience coming to Google TV would no longer be branded with Google Assistant.

As of this testing phase on the Nest Audio and Mini, Google still refers to the Gemini model-powered upgrade as the Assistant. We’ll see if that changes at launch.

The only mention to this I/O was in a blog post about the new Home Summary Widget for Pixel. Google said it “previewed Gemini enhancing the voice experience on smart speakers, smart displays, and Google TV, enabling more natural interaction, deeper exploration of topics, device control, and even voice-based automation creation.” Google has yet to expand testing to the Nest Hub.