- Google Home launches Gemini to 16 more regions
- Despite this, users are still experiencing performance issues with commands
- A handful of users have aired their thoughts on Reddit, but Google has fine-tuned the experience
After a six-month wait, Google Home is finally expanding its Gemini early access program to countries outside of the US, Canada and Mexico, but users aren’t quite getting along with the updated voice assistant.
The company shared a post on the Google Nest Community site detailing that it will roll out Gemini for the home in 7 new languages to the following 16 countries:
- Austria
- Belgium
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Ireland
- Italy
- The Netherlands
- Norway
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Great Britain
- Australia
- Japan
- New Zealand
As mentioned, the rollout is still in early access, so you’ll only get access to Gemini for Home on your Google smart speaker or display if you sign up through the Google Home app, as 9to5Google puts it.
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The move is part of the company’s massive overhaul of Google Assistant, its longtime virtual assistant across Google’s line of smart home devices, including Google Nest Audio and the Google Nest Hub smart display. Google announced the replacement back in October 2025, but the rollout hasn’t been the smoothest, and users have been faced with major issues that have yet to be resolved.
“I switched back to Google Assistant”
Users had hoped that the Gemini home upgrade would be the answer to a smoother smart home experience, but it turns out that this is far from the case. If anything, owners of Google Home devices have called it a ‘downgrade’, as a Reddit thread puts it, but why do users hate it so much?
A common problem among Google Home users is the slow and sometimes absent responses to home commands. As one user shared, they experienced a 7-10 second delay before Gemini took action after asking it to turn on a light; “It’s so slow to trigger my home commands, it’s almost worthless”, they claimed. And the same goes for routines, as another frustrated user pointed out: ‘In the worst cases it’s like a five minute delay, but lately it’s about ten seconds’.
The increase in these common errors has not convinced users that Gemini for Home is a suitable enough model to replace the Google Assistant, which according to a handful of users is probably the better one. As a result, users are looking for ways to return to using the voice assistant’s predecessor, but Google has promised a number of much-needed upgrades in Gemini for Home’s global rollout.
With the next phase of the global expansion of Gemini for Home, the tech giant revealed that it has fine-tuned the Gemini experience based on user feedback. In addition to updating support for the family experience and reducing scope to ensure more natural interactions, Google says it has reduced smart home latency by 40% for faster responses to voice commands, as well as improving Gemini’s context-aware intelligence to distinguish between the various devices in your smart home ecosystem.
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