Oops, we made you think someone broke into your house.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
Several times I have seen Geminis mistake dogs and completely empty rooms (or maybe a shadow?) for a person. This may be alarming at first, but after a few false positives you begin to lose trust in 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 method for Gemini Home Advanced.
“You can't turn off the AI description and still keep the basic notification,” a Google spokesperson told me. However, they noted that you can turn off alerts to people in the app. They turn on when you turn on Google's familiar face detection.
Geminis often bend reality a little instead of creating it from whole cloth. A person who keeps something in the backyard is doing yard work. One person anywhere, doing anything, becomes several people. A dog toy becomes a cat lying in the sun. A couple of birds become a raccoon. Geminis also like to ignore things like denial of package delivery, even if there is a video labeled “man delivering a package.”
The twins still refused to admit their mistake.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
The twins still refused to admit their mistake.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
In the end, Gemini labels majority clips correctly and therefore produce mostly accurate, if sometimes unhelpful, notifications. The problem is the other side of the word “mostly”, which is that there are still a lot of bugs. Some of these mistakes have you checking your cameras—at least before you get tired of Gemini's chatter. Instead of saving you time and keeping you updated on what's going on at home, you're wasting your time. For this thing to be useful, output errors cannot be an everyday occurrence.
Learning 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 the number of erroneous notifications. The company also believes that giving people the ability to add their own instructions is a critical piece of the puzzle. Perhaps in the future Gemini for Home will become more honest, but for now it takes a lot of effort to move it in the right direction.
