In a new twist, Google could be working on some new smart home hardware. Fresh evidence suggests that the company is planning to release an upgraded Nest Hub Max, and a new Nest Audio device, at some point in the future.
This discovery has come from a teardown of the latest Google Home App (Version 3.16) by 9to5Google. After decompiling the file and exploring the code, the site discovered references to an unreleased device explicitly labelled “Nest Hub Max”, as well as another called a “Nest Audio”. These appear to be new devices because they’re named alongside their previous iterations.
What’s interesting is that the new Nest Hub Max will be powered by Google Assistant, just like the current Nest Hub range, according to 9To5Google. For months it has looked like the writing was on the wall for Assistant and the devices that rely on it.
The Google Pixel Tablet was designed to be both a smart home device, thanks to its speaker dock, and a standard tablet. This, alongside Google deleting Assistant features, and the rise of Gemini, suggested the company was done with the platform.
A new Nest display that runs Assistant, as it is today, would be a surprise move from Google. What we don’t know is if Gemini will play a role in the new smart home devices. Perhaps Gemini will make it onto the Nest Hub via a dedicated app, as it has in the Pixel 8 series.
The Nest Audio is fairly straightforward speaker, but the refreshed Nest Hub Max has intrigued me. I have written before about how Gemini can transform the Nest range if Google finds a way to integrate them.
“Gemini is, or has the potential to be, a true household assistant. I put a recipe into Gemini and asked it to strip out the ingredients into bullet points and put them into a shopping list on Google Keep. It did the first two tasks perfectly, but it couldn’t connect up with Keep.
“If there’s a future where it can, and I imagine there will be because this is all Google tech, then that is exciting. Imagine asking your Gemini Nest Hub to find three different recipes and put the ingredients into your shopping list, which is then instantly ready on your phone, with no manual intervention needed other than a single prompt.” As I explained in this story.
The problem is that Gemini doesn’t yet have the ability to control smart home devices and we don’t know how complex this is to achieve for Google’s engineering team. The fact that it may be persisting with Assistant on new hardware suggests it is not easy.
There are other areas Google needs to improve with the Nest, like touch responsiveness and the product’s general reliability. But if these devices do ever make it to market it will be interesting to see what Google does with them in the era of generative AI.
