By Wes Davis
Publication Date: 2025-11-23 13:00:00
Google is betting that AI can justify the high price of its smart home security camera subscriptions. The idea is that with AI, your notifications would read more like a human looked outside and told you what they saw. And instead of you scrolling through endless video footage to see what happened, AI can summarize the day for you. Sounds good, right? Sounds great to me.
If you already read my Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen) review, you’ll know the reality, as I experienced it, is underwhelming. Notifications, generated by Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, constantly misidentified my pets and gave weird and wrong descriptions of events taking place in triggered recordings. Daily summaries of my family’s comings and goings made it sound like my house was being mobbed with people and animals. None of it helped justify the pricey cloud storage service that the Google Home Premium (formerly Nest Aware) subscriptions otherwise are. And without those subscriptions, the…
