Gemini for Home sharpens Familiar Face, animal detection

Smarter Nest Cams

Familiar Face filtering now prioritizes clear, complete images to reduce false matches and improve detection accuracy.
Improved animal detection distinguishes dogs and cats at a distance and better identifies color in low‑light scenes.
Home Brief descriptions are more useful for unidentified people and longer videos now get richer AI-generated summaries.

What’s new in Gemini for Home

Google rolled out a set of camera-focused updates to Gemini for Home on December 22, 2025, targeting Nest and other compatible cameras. The changes come after feedback from the Early Access program and aim to improve visual recognition and the quality of AI summaries.

Familiar Face: quality-first matching

The Familiar Face algorithm has been retuned to ignore blurry or partial face captures and to favor higher-quality images when building a user’s face library. Google says this prioritization makes detection "more accurate." The update should reduce false positives and make the Familiar Face list more representative of how people actually appear on camera.

Home Brief—the quick summary feature that describes activity caught on camera—also benefits. It now does a better job describing people who aren’t matched to a Familiar Face, including cases where faces are partly obscured or not fully visible.

Animal detection and low-light color ID

Gemini for Home’s vision model is now better at telling dogs and cats apart from a distance. That means fewer misidentified pets when cameras are zoomed out or when animals are farther from the lens.

Low-light animal color recognition has been improved as well. The model can more reliably report an animal’s color in dim conditions, which is useful for owners trying to identify a specific pet or stray at night.

Richer video descriptions

Google is also enhancing AI-generated descriptions for longer videos. The system will generate more detailed summaries to increase the chance that key events you care about are included in the Home Brief or timeline highlights.

Rollout and availability

These updates are rolling out now to "Gemini for Home enabled cameras from Nest and others," according to Google. The company recommends checking the official support page for the full December changelog and notes users should "expect more tuning and updates as we head into the new year."

What this means for users

For Nest Cam owners and others on the Gemini for Home platform, the changes should reduce noise in alerts and make summaries more actionable. Continued tuning suggests additional refinements are likely in early 2026.

Overall, the update is a pragmatic step: improving image quality awareness, distinguishing animals more reliably, and producing clearer, more helpful video summaries for smart home cameras.

Google Home App: 5 Upgrades to Detection

Google Home App Adds 5 Upgrades to Face & Animal AI

* Familiar Face library cleaned up to improve person identification accuracy. * Animal detection now distinguishes cats and dogs at distance and better preserves colors. * Home Brief descriptions for people are more accurate when faces aren’t visible. * Longer videos get richer AI-generated summaries to capture important events. What’s included in

Arovia Splay: Portable Projector That Doubles as Monitor

Splay Review: Subpar Monitor, Brilliant Portable Projector

* Portable projector and collapsible monitor in one: Arovia’s Splay folds into a 4×4-inch case and weighs about 2.5 pounds. * Strength in projector mode: ultra-short-throw pico projector claims 285 lumens and up to an 80-inch image; integrated fabric screen removes the "right room" problem. * Weakness as

Is It Okay For Games To Be This Good? Dev Picks 2025

• Key Takeaways: * Game developers across studios named wildly different 2025 favourites, from chaotic co-op (Peak) to tightly written narrative experiments (Type Help). * The list highlights recurring trends: retro-arcade revivals (Parking Garage Rally Circuit), inventive storytelling (The Alters, The Roottrees are Dead) and polished roguelike design (Hades 2). * Several picks are

Safety Panel: NASA Should Have Declared Starliner Mishap

Key Takeaways: * A NASA safety advisory panel says agency leaders should have declared an in‑flight mishap or high‑visibility close call after Boeing’s CST‑100 Starliner experienced thruster failures and helium leaks in June 2024. * Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams remained on the ISS for nine months;