Months after the promised change, Google Home is as unreliable as it was

At this point, my only reaction to my Google Nest Hub or Audio speakers not understanding what I asked for is to shrug. It’s a common enough occurrence that my husband and I no longer get angry or disappointed about it; we just try again, and maybe that’ll work, maybe it won’t, and if not, we just pull up our phones and do the thing that Google’s almight assistant was supposed to help us do.

And we’re not the only ones. Hundreds of users are still complaining about Gemini, or Assistant, or both on Reddit. Commands that don’t work, routines that refuse to execute, mishearing, mis-executing, black-box troubleshooting when something fails, and on top of it all, a Gemini AI that is as good as throwing a ball at a stray dog and hoping they understand the concept of catch without ever being trained to.

Change doesn’t happen in a day and undoing a decade of bad experiences takes months, but I’m still disappointed to see that the promise of a more reliable and capable Google Home that Anish Kattukaran, Chief Product Officer at Google Home and Nest, made last October is still pretty much unfulfilled.

Of course, I’ve seen changes and improvements in the Google Home app over the last couple of months. Automations are now much more powerful than they ever were, with triggers, conditions, and actions that used to be impossible last year. Just this month, Google added a bunch of new capabilities, like playing chimes and music, and deleting preset automations if you never used them. Likewise, a lot of my existing complaints about kneecapped automations are gone: I can now control my vacuums and pause my washing machine. That’s all good, but it barely moves the needle on the buggy and restricted user experience that we’ve had for years in Google Home.

My upstairs office speakers still get triggered and try to answer when I’m standing right in front of the Nest Hub in the downstairs kitchen. Sometimes, my speaker recognizes my voice; other times, it pretends I’m a guest. Any timer I set on a speaker or hub can’t be turned off from another device or from my Google Pixel’s At A Glance widget; I have to shout across the whole house to get it to stop. “Turn off all the lights,” still leaves one or two random lights on across the house, forcing me to repeat it again. “That device isn’t set up yet” is a frequent answer to a bunch of controls that work one day and fail the next because somehow Google misunderstood “bedroom fan.”

Everything on Google Home is a black box of trust. Things should work, but if it they don’t, there’s no explanation why, no logs, no way to troubleshoot. I once thought it was my bad connection, then I blamed my dual-language setup and removed French to avoid confusing the English voice model, then I thought it was the Preview Program I’d joined to early-test some features. Spoiler: It’s none of those.

“Set a calendar event for tomorrow noon,” works sometimes, then other times, my speaker decides to create a calendar event named “tomorrow noon.” I say “Hey Google, uh, uh, nothing,” and Google launches into a long explanation of what Nothing, the phone company, is. Playing music on any default speakers that have been set as a group is a crapshoot (Reddit agrees). I have “babies” on my shopping list instead of Baileys. And Google Home still refuses to treat any non-Nest camera with a modicum of respect: My Tapo cams show up as an icon but always fail to live stream or show any events. Even asking about something as simple as calendar events, which used to work across multiple accounts and calendars a couple of years ago, now requires an entire charade to set up with Gemini.

Speaking of Gemini on speakers; I own a Pixel 10 Pro XL, so I’ve been forcibly switched away from Assistant. My speakers and home switched, too… on paper. But since I live in France and speak English, so I get the new Gemini voice, but all the answers are Google Assistant’s dumb answers. So yes, my speakers sound more natural, but they’re still as incompetent.

Last July, we ran a survey that asked you, our readers, how reliable Google Home was to you. We got over 10,000 votes with 7 out of 10 saying they had frequest issues. I’m willing to bet that Gemini didn’t fix any of these, nor did anything else happen to make the entire system more reliable.

Personally, I tried to mitigate several of the issues with automations, since that’s the area that’s receiving the most love now from the Google Home team. Plus, it just seemed like a no-brainer to reduce friction by bundling together a bunch of voice commands into a few words, or by making things happen automatically without my intervention. But I still have issues. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to set a command or automation that plays music on my Pixel Tablet — it used to work last year, then it stopped, and now it just won’t execute despite the new “Play” action. I still can’t create an automation around a group of lights or blinds; I have to add a new action for each device on its own. I can’t use all my sensors’ states (like my air quality monitor), nor can I do anything with most devices besides turn them on or off.

If this is the part getting love and updates, you can imagine using anything else — speaker groups, rooms and zones (or the lack thereof), smart home dashboards, more advanced device integrations, or the utter disaster that is Matter on Google. Seriously, if anyone has had any good experience with the latter, please raise your hand, because you’re a unicorn. My two Matter experiences on Google have been absolute no-nos, and everything I’ve seen from other users aligns with that.

Last year, after I moved into my new house, I decided that Google Home wasn’t going to cut it anymore. I was planning on automating 30+ lights and plugs, a couple of dozen blinds and shutters, an entire alarm system, locks, sensors, vacuums, and appliances. I used to dream and believe that Google Home would’ve and should’ve reached a stable and powerful level to handle such a complex smart home after all these years. But it hasn’t.

I had built my previous smart homes with Google, but they were falling apart, so this time, I went for Home Assistant and had to learn from scratch all the idiosyncrasies of the platform, from building my own dashboards to tinkering with code and understanding YAML, reading logs, creating complex automations, and putting together a solid Zigbee mesh. I’m not saying this just as an anecdote, but because following Home Assistant’s development over the last 12 months has shown me what it’s like to use a competent platform made by competent developers.

I’m weighing my words very carefully here: It is mindboggling how lazy Google Home’s developers have been. They’re some of the best-paid developers in the world, working for one of the most powerful companies, and they can’t ship a decent changelog. Meanwhile, here is Home Assistant’s changelog for February 2026. A video, plus a post, with a table of contents and all of the documented changes, with screenshots and links, and any explanation you need. The best part? They do this every month. Every effin’ month. When I started using Home Assistant last year, the default dashboard was a painful deterrent, and automations were impossible to decipher; now, those two areas have been mostly fixed.

Coming from Google Home’s once-in-a-blue-moon update to a platform that has genuinely become a lot easier to onboard and use and gained a lot of extra functionality over the last year is eye-opening. Especially when there are clockwork monthly updates with dozens of improvements to look forward to.

When my Home Assistant’s Roborock integration broke last month, someone else immediately filed a ticket with a similar problem, people figured out a solution, changes were made, and I know exactly when they’ll be merged into the stable platform. With Google? It’s all a black box. What works today might not work tomorrow, and who knows when it’ll be fixed.

Look, I don’t want Google Home to be as powerful or as nerdy as Home Assistant; that’d break its normal user purpose. But I wish Google Home’s development were as fast, as efficient, and as transparent as Home Assistant. The blueprint to a magnificent smart home platform is out there; it is feasible, but Google just won’t do it.