The Gemini for Home voice assistant is now more concise, faster, & better at alarms/timers

Google is back with a second big update to Gemini for Home this month that notably improves the voice assistant.

Voice Assistant

There are a number of updates to the Gemini for Home voice assistant today. Google has improved the latency of everyday commands, like “Turn on the lights,” by 40%. The verbosity of alarms & timers, notes & lists, calendar events, and other productivity responses has been reduced. 

For example, instead of “Alright, I’ve created an alarm for 9 AM,” Gemini will simply say “Alarm set for 9 AM.”

Similarly, there are five improvements to alarms & timers:

• Set alarms or timers based on Gemini’s knowledge about the world. For example, ask: “Set an alarm for the start of the FIFA world cup.”
• Ask for the initial timer set time in addition to how much time remains. For example, ask: “What was the original time of my timer and how much time is left?”
• Perform multiple alarm & timer commands in a single interaction. For example, say: “Cancel my timer then set a new one.”
• Fixed – Set recurring alarms and timers. For example, you can ask: “Wake me up on weekdays at 7 AM.”
• Fixed – Snooze an alarm. For example, you can sleep in a little by saying: “Snooze until 10 AM.”

You can also now create multiple calendar events with the same details. 

Try creating a lunch event, then asking “Can you create another one for the following week?”

Gemini is also better at detecting local weather units and will provide more relevant local news responses.

Finally, Early Access to the voice assistant is now available for all of Canada, with the addition of Canadian French support. 

Gemini Live’s Translation mode is now “significantly quicker” with support between 30 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Google Home app

Ask Home, Home Brief, Help me create, and Gemini for Home camera features are expanding beyond Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

The final update today adds new starters, conditions and actions to the automation editor:

New Starters/Conditions:

• Oven is running, stopped, paused, or has an error: e.g. “When the oven is running…”

New Actions:

• Voice assistant reports local weather: e.g. “Announce tomorrow’s weather”
• Set smart bulb to wake: e.g. “…start my wake light effects for my bedroom light at AM”
• Set smart bulb to pulse: e.g. “…pulse the living room light for one minute”
• Set smart bulb to sleep: e.g. “…start sleep light effect in kid’s room for 10 minutes”