Strangers in black cloaks sneaking around the front door, phantom rodents scurrying around the backyard, threatening figures with black bags and hammers. Scared yet?
Those are just some of the things that Google’s Gemini have been reporting in its Home Briefs—the summaries it can produce of the daily goings-on detected by Nest security cameras and other connected smart home devices—and some Gemini for Home users say they’re getting thoroughly creeped out by the briefings, particularly with Halloween right around the corner.
“Throughout the morning, several instances of people in black cloaks or robes were observed standing in the yard,” read a Home Brief screenshot posed by a Google Home user on Reddit. “The unusual presence of individuals in black cloaks or robes continued into the afternoon, with multiple sighting in the yard and approaching the driveway.”
Talk about a spooky report, but the reality turned out to be pretty innocuous.
“It’s hilarious, I got this summary today,” the user said. “For the ‘black cloaks or robes,’ I have Halloween decorations that the camera sees.”
The user allowed that the creepy description was more or less “accurate,” but that another event reported in the briefing (“a person was seen walking by the playset in the Backyard”) didn’t happen: “The person by the playset doesn’t exist, the clip showed nobody.”
In a similar occurrence, another Gemini for Home users posted a screenshot of a Home Brief report about someone “walking up the driveway carrying a black bag and a hammer.”
Again, spooky, but no cause for alarm. “We were putting Halloween decorations out yesterday,” the user wrote. “Sounds like we were committing a gruesome crime.”
Android Authority, which first reported Gemini’s creepy Home Brief summaries, noted that plenty of Gemini for Home users have had good experiences with daily summaries, calling them “spot on” and “quite impressive,” while some of the Home Brief inaccuracies were fairly minor: for example, a car that was “not a Tesla Model 3, it was a Toyota Corolla.”
But other Gemini for Home users say their Gemini-powered Nest cameras have mistaken cats for raccoons (or the other way around), while one user said their Home Brief warned of a raccoon that apparently wasn’t there: “It said it could not find the video. I said, ‘You’re the one who told me of this raccoon.’ It said something like ‘I know I said that but there’s no such video of the incident.’”
We’ve reached out to Google for comment.
Home Brief is a feature included in Google’s $20-a-month Google Home Advanced plan. Once enabled, Home Brief will crank out a daily report of what Gemini for Home has seen and detected around your smart home in the past 24 hours, including events captured by your Gemini-enabled Nest cameras. The feature is intended to give you a quick overview of daily activity without having to plow through a lengthy list of individual smart home updates.
Google says it’s gone to great lengths to ensure that Gemini for Home’s reports are accurate, while Google’s “Familiar Faces” feature can help to pinpoint or screen out updates about the comings and goings of household members.
Still, it’s easy to imagine how the hallucinations common to most LLMs could creep into Google’s Home Brief summaries. (I’m still waiting for Gemini for Home access.) That’s probably why Google is taking its time with Gemini for Home’s rollout. A new Google Home Speaker, for example, was announced earlier this month, but it won’t ship until next spring.
This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.