Oops, you were led to believe that someone broke into your home.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
Oops, you were led to believe that someone broke into your home.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
On several occasions, I have seen Geminis mistake dogs and completely empty rooms (or maybe a shadow?) for a person. This may seem alarming at first, but after a few false positives, you start to become suspicious of the robot. Now, even if Gemini correctly identified a random person in the house, I would probably ignore it. Unfortunately, this is the only notification experience for Gemini Home Advanced.
“You can’t turn off the AI description while keeping the basic notification,” a Google spokesperson told me. They did, however, note that you can turn off person alerts in the app. These are enabled when you enable Google’s familiar face detection.
Gemini often distorts reality a little instead of creating it from scratch. A person holding something in the garden is doing gardening work. One person anywhere, doing anything, becomes many people. A dog toy becomes a cat lying in the sun. Some birds become a raccoon. Gemini also likes to ignore things, like denying that there was a package delivery, even though there is a video labeled as “a person delivering a package.”
Gemini still refused to admit that it was wrong.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
Gemini still refused to admit that it was wrong.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
Ultimately, Gemini labels most clips on correctly and therefore produces mostly accurate, although sometimes unnecessary, notifications. The problem is the flip side of the phrase “most of the time,” which still represents a lot of error. Some of these mistakes require you to check your cameras, at least before you tire of Gemini’s confabulations. Instead of saving time and keeping you updated on what’s happening at home, it wastes your time. For this thing to be useful, inference errors cannot be everyday.
Learn as you go
Google says its goal is to make Gemini for Home better for everyone. The team is “investing heavily in improving accurate identification” to reduce erroneous notifications. The company also believes that asking users to add personalized instructions is a critical piece of the puzzle. Maybe in the future Gemini for Home will be more honest, but currently it takes a lot of hand-holding to move it in the right direction.
