Software

Google Home App Adds 5 Upgrades to Face & Animal AI

Smarter Home App

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 the update

Google has rolled out an update to the Google Home app that focuses on improving on-device and cloud-assisted detection and AI summaries. The release targets Familiar Face recognition, animal identification and color handling, Home Brief wording, and AI descriptions for longer video clips.

Familiar Face library quality improvements

Google says the algorithm that identifies people relies on images stored in a face library. Low-quality or partial images can reduce matching accuracy.

The update prunes or improves the quality of entries in that library, which should reduce false matches and missed identifications when Familiar Face is enabled.

Better animal identification and color handling

Pet detection now does a better job distinguishing cats from dogs at a distance, addressing common misidentifications in wider or lower-resolution shots.

The app’s model has also been adjusted to preserve animal colors more accurately, especially in poor lighting, which minimizes incorrect color labels in snapshots and clips.

Improved Home Brief people descriptions

When a person’s face isn’t visible—for example, if they’re turned away or partially occluded—Home Brief will now use clearer, more accurate wording to describe who appears in events.

This aims to reduce vague or misleading descriptions in daily summaries and make alerts more useful at a glance.

Richer AI descriptions for longer videos

For longer recordings, the AI-generated summaries will include additional context so that significant events are more likely to be captured in the description. This change helps surface the moments users care about without watching full clips.

Rollout and availability

Google began rolling these changes out to Home app users on the published release date. Availability may vary by device, region, and app version; expect the improvements to appear on Android and iOS instances of Google Home as the update reaches your account.

If you use Nest or Google Home cameras, check the app after updating and review Familiar Face settings to confirm improvements appear in your face library and summaries.

Why it matters

These updates are incremental but practical: they reduce misidentifications, make daily summaries more useful, and give users clearer, more accurate descriptions of recorded events. For households using Google Home and Nest devices, the changes should improve everyday reliability of alerts and video summaries.

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