Google Home is working on AI insights, a new UI for creating routines, and more (APK teardown)

With an app like Google Home, so intimately tied to our ecosystem of smart home devices, it’s easy to think of progress in terms of hardware support: Many of the updates we see the app receive are designed to deliver compatibility with more and more devices, like we just saw happen with the Nest Protect smoke detector. But that’s far from the only way that Home evolves, and this week we’ve uncovered a few new directions where Google could be about to bring some new functionality to its smart home hub.

We’ve got quite a bit of ground to cover here, so let’s get right into it with — what else, this is 2025, after all — some Gemini AI enhancements. Google’s on somewhat of a war path to integrate Gemini into every product and service under its domain, and Home is no exception. For everything we’re talking about today, we’re looking at a dogfood build of Google Home 3.29, and using this release we were able to access a new Floating Action Button (FAB) for viewing AI-generated insights:

When active, Home will deliver tips and feedback based on your app usage and interactions with your devices. It looks like Google’s working on a system for delivering feedback based on the quality and usefulness of these insights, and allow users to filter their few to only show favorites.

We can also see what appears to be a whole new UI for creating routines, now integrating cards that slide up from the bottom of the screen. While some of this is just aesthetic, we spot Google adding a new “Conditions” section that joins Starters and Actions for defining routines. While Home already offers some degree of granular control over the specific circumstances in which routines should be triggered through the ability to stack Starters, Conditions should offer even more explicit and powerful control.

Those include setting time ranges, rather than just specific start times, but maybe the most interesting option here is Presence, which is available as both a Condition and a Starter. This works much like Home’s existing support for Home & Away routines, which uses a combination of sensor data from your smart home hardware and location data from your phone to determine whether your home is empty or has people occupying it. And with Conditions, you can easily use that as a factor in deciding whether or not an automation should run.

Other tweaks we’re spotting in here are even smaller, like a modified toggle for setting individual routines as active or inactive. We also see some progress on in-development features we uncovered earlier, but were far from fleshed out at the time. You might recall the Google Home vacation mode we spotted last year that looked like it would let you configure automations for an extended period away from home. At the time, we couldn’t even choose the dates for our travel, but now we’re finally able to access that interface:

Like we said, there’s a lot going on here, and many of these changes are probably still up in the air. Stuff like the AI insights we’re probably going to get at some point, but exactly how Google integrates them into the Home app could continue to change before that happens. UI elements are always at risk of being rearranged and presented in different styles, and we’ll just have to wait and see which bits here might end up making the cut. Just like with Home’s vacation mode, we’ll be keeping an eye out for any further progress along these multiple lines.