The cost of the smart home is going up

is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. All the smart home news, reviews, and gadgets you need to know about Selling the smart home has been hard. Even Amazon has lost money in the space, despite putting hundreds of millions of Echo devices in people’s homes. Google has also reportedly struggled to turn a profit from its substantial investment in Nest. But now Google is seeing dollar signs in the prospect of selling AI-driven subscriptions in the smart home. And it’s not alone. At Google I/O this week, Google announced it’s expanding its Gemini for Home APIs to allow companies to integrate more of its Gemini-powered smart home features into their own apps. In a blog post, Google’s Ravi Akella, director of product management for the Home Platform, said this will enable “service providers and hardware manufacturers to build monetizable, proactive services that care for users and their homes.” These features include those currently offered on its Google Home platform and Nest cameras, such as AI-generated text descriptions from cameras that tell you “a child is riding a bike on the lawn” rather than just “person detected,” and Ask Home, which lets you query your home with natural language, such as search your camera feeds to find when the UPS driver came by. Google is also expanding access to its Home Brief feature, which summarizes what happened around your home at the end of each day, to third parties, and adding the ability to use natural language to create routines, such as “make my home look occupied when I’m not here.” Previous Next 1 / 3 Google’s Home Brief summarizes the day’s activity from cameras and devices around a home. Screenshot by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Companies like ADT and AT&T are already using Google’s Home APIs in their home security systems, and this expansion will allow third parties to put the Google Home Premium subscription and its related features into their own app and subscription services, according to Google. So, now your ISP, wireless carrier, and home security provider could be selling you a smart home powered by Gemini AI and even build their own hardware to run it. Google also announced it’s allowing third parties to build smart speakers with Gemini built in, as well as security cameras that work with Gemini — something Walmart did with its Onn cameras last year. The push toward subscription models is part of a wider shift in the smart home — the hope that AI’s new capabilities may finally provide a sustainable revenue stream for smart home companies. But their revenue stream may become your subscription fatigue — and based on my experience with these new capabilities, there’s still a long way to go until they deliver real value. Today, it’s more like enhanced computer vision than genuine intelligence. And while more descriptive alerts can be useful, they can also be inaccurate. One AI-powered camera warned me of a brown bear in my backyard in coastal South Carolina. (It was my dog). To really change the game for the smart home and become something worth paying for, AI needs to become proactive — understand context, and detect anomalies. Rather than you having to set up smart home routines to tell you when something happens, your home should understand what’s normal and flag what isn’t. If your smart home can know that you left the gate open around the time you normally let the dog out into the yard, and alert you before the dog can escape, or detect that an elderly parent hasn’t moved around their home for a few hours and prompt you to check in, that could add real value. Ring has a new beta feature that works toward this: Unusual Event Alerts. It only notifies you about things it considers unusual — but this means there’s a risk it could miss something. Reliably finding the anomalies and alerting you to them, rather than sending you an AI-generated essay about your home, is where real value lies. Google’s pitch promises “proactive services that care for users and their homes” — and while they may argue that filtering notifications using computer vision is proactive, that’s only part of the solution. The rising costs of smart home ownership Then there’s the other challenge. When and if AI in the smart home can deliver genuine value, I’m not convinced people will be willing to pay more for it. Subscription fatigue is real, and AI has already driven up the cost of smart home ownership. Amazon has started charging $20 a month for Alexa Plus if you don’t pay for Prime, and Google has put many Gemini for Home features behind a paywall. Top-tier subscriptions have risen sharply in recent years, costing $200 or more Of course, if you’re already paying for a home security monitoring plan (Ring’s $200 sub includes that), AI features can add val