The cost of the smart home is going up

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. …