Eight Years of Waiting
Let’s do the math: the first Google Home arrived in 2016, in Italy in 2018. Eight years in which the home voice assistant stayed essentially frozen, while outside the world was exploding. ChatGPT revolutionized the way we interact with machines, Claude redefined what it means to have an assistant that reasons, Perplexity reinvented search. And our Google Home? Still sitting there, with the same four canned responses.
It had become almost embarrassing: you had in your pocket a phone with an AI capable of building an entire company on its own, and in your living room a speaker that couldn’t tell the difference between “turn on the bathroom light” and “turn on the living room light.”
D-Day: April 7, 2026
On April 7–8, 2026, Google announced the expansion of Gemini for Home to 16 new countries, including Italy. This isn’t an automatic update: anyone who wants to try the new assistant has to manually enable the feature through the Google Home app.
The procedure is simple:
- Open the Google Home app (version 4.12 or later)
- Tap your profile picture in the top right
- Go to Home settings → Preview access
- Wait for the invitation or request it
For those who don’t want to wait, there’s a workaround: go to Google Groups, open General settings, and make sure the option “Allow group managers to add me to their groups” is ticked TecnoAndroid. Then go back to the Google Home app and request preview access.
Once activated, Gemini will be immediately available to all household members, and compatible devices will automatically switch from Google Assistant to the new Gemini voice assistant Google Support.
What Actually Changes
This isn’t a cosmetic makeover. It’s a brain transplant.
Google claims a latency reduction of up to 40% for the most common commands. But it isn’t only a matter of speed. Gemini is now more accurate at distinguishing between similar devices and uses data such as your home address to provide more precise information about weather and local news SmartWorld.
The main new features:
- Natural understanding: you can say “set the lights to the color of the ocean” and it understands what to do, without having to remember the technical name of a preset scene
- Shorter responses: timers and alarms no longer trigger endless monologues
- World-aware alarms: you can link an alarm to the kickoff of your team’s game, without specifying a time
- Gemini Live (for Google Home Premium subscribers): say “Hey Google, let’s chat” and start a real, fluid conversation on any topic
- Real-time video search: for those with Nest cameras and a Premium subscription, you can query the video feeds to figure out what’s happening at home
- Kids profiles: support for supervised accounts, for safer family use
Compatible devices include Nest Hub (first and second generation), Nest Hub Max, Nest Audio, Nest Mini first and second generation, Google Home, and the Nest Wifi access point TecnoAndroid. Not all of them support Gemini Live: older models work with Gemini in Home but without the advanced conversation mode.
The Real Ace Up the Sleeve: Massive Reach
And here we get to the point that matters most to me. Google Assistant is installed on over 1 billion devices and Google Home is compatible with more than 50,000 smart devices from over 10,000 brands Coolest Gadgets. These numbers are impressive and tell a clear story: Google has a distribution channel for AI that no other competitor owns.
Think about it: OpenAI has ChatGPT, Anthropic has Claude, but to use them you have to open a browser or an app. Google, on the other hand, already has AI sitting in your living room, in your kitchen, in your bedroom. With a software update, millions of devices worldwide go from being plain speakers to AI terminals. It’s as if, tomorrow morning, every TV in the world suddenly became smart: you don’t have to buy anything new — it’s already there.
As I wrote in my previous article “Google is here!”, Google’s competitive advantage lies precisely in its distribution capability: its AI reaches millions of people with a single click, through an ecosystem of services that’s already consolidated.
And the Others? Where Are They?
Amazon Alexa: in 2026, Alexa excels at automation and integration with Amazon’s commerce, but Google beats it on contextual understanding and complex conversations thanks to Gemini Smarthomefuel. Alexa+ has arrived, yes, but the rollout has been rough, with bugs that cranked heating up to insane temperatures at night and wrong responses to voice commands XDA Developers. And Amazon removed the option to opt out of sending voice recordings — which isn’t exactly reassuring.
Apple Siri: as of April 8, 2026, Siri’s most ambitious features — including contextual understanding and cross-app actions — are still in development SiliconSnark. Apple, as so often happens, is chronically behind on this front. HomePod remains a great speaker but a poor assistant.
Home Assistant: deserves a mention. The open-source project has grown quietly, earning the first Matter certification for an open-source platform and offering dedicated voice hardware at $60 XDA Developers. It’s the alternative for tinkerers, but it isn’t (and won’t be) a product for the mass market.
The reality is this: in the race for AI voice assistants for the home, I see only two real contenders — Google and Amazon. And Google, with Gemini, has just landed the decisive punch.
The Future Is Voice (and Smart)
The real game isn’t only about who has the best chatbot. The challenge is about who — or what — will be the intermediary between us and the digital world. AI voice assistants are becoming the new operating system of the home. Whoever controls that entry point controls the relationship between the user and every digital service.
Google has understood this. And with Gemini for Home it has made the right move at the right time: bring generative AI — the real kind, the one that actually reasons — inside the devices that millions of people already have in their homes. You don’t have to buy anything. You don’t have to install anything. Just activate it from the app.
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