“Unexpectedly, a deer briefly entered the family room”: Living with Gemini Home

Gemini for Home unleashes gen AI on your Nest camera footage, but it gets a lot wrong.

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[EvolvedMonkey]

the AI errors and output described here feel like what you get when talking to a person with earlier stage dementia.

 

[SixDegrees]

the AI errors and output described here feel like what you get when talking to a person with earlier stage dementia.

More advanced, really. A case I'm familiar with didn't start seeing the evil leprechauns in the front yard for quite a while.

 

[brandorf]

I have greyhounds, so I would also have the phantom deer issue. ;p

I dumped all the nest cameras in my house in 2023 when there was yet another price hike for the cloud subscription, and if I remember correctly, they also switch to charging me per camera. I dropped all the cameras and doorbell with TP-link models, which had a much cheaper plan, and can record locally to SD in the event of outage.

All that saying that I'm glad I won't need to deal with this, and my cameras have never misidentified the dogs as a deer.

 

[Bash]

Hounds may not be the most common dog archetype these days, but they're a classic. They're on Roman coins!

Yes hounds certainly are classic dogs, but we're talking about Gemini -- it's probably only trained on what appeared on reddit during 2023 or something like that. (/s)

 

[8x10 glosssy]

This sounds like something out of the book titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by neurologist Oliver Sacks

 

[Nerdboi]

Funny my orange cat (who to be fair is the least smart of the three or so we thought) figured out how to open the bedroom door the other day. That an AI can identify that a person is in uniform but not that they put a box down is silly. The orange cat of course would identify the box and if the cat figured out how to open the front door would be trying to get inside said box.

 

[fluctuationEM]

I see Gemini has not been trained by Elden Ring in-game responses.

 

[WebScorpion]

I think the whole LLM movement is misguided. It's obviously not the path to 'intelligence'. If I could process the entire internet, I could not make many better decisions than I can with the limited information I currently have in my memory. That's not how we come to 'intelligent' decisions. The true path to intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is making accurate decisions based on limited information. Stop wasting Gigawatts of energy to process massive amounts of data and work on that. How do we make such intuitive decisions with limited information? Solve that puzzle and you're on your way to intelligence, IMHO.

 

[mcswell]

Ok, a deer in the living room...but I want to know why it missed that gorilla walking through the basketball game!
(https://practicalpie.com/invisible-gorilla/)

 

[fluffymitten]

Just out of interest: is all the video stored on Google's servers and you can't download it to your own storage? Is that why people are paying for the package that includes longer retention? I can see value in event clips being usefully labelled and then I'd be looking to store them on a device I control so I can choose how long to retain them for.

 

[Zertz]

What I don’t get is that Google Photos, when it ran on plain old boring machine learning, was super accurate. It never confused animals, it never hallucinated people, and so on.

How can they consider Gemini to be anything but complete garbage?

 

[snarkota]

or, there may be a deer, secretly hiding somewhere in your house. And dogs are in some kind of conspiracy with it. Granted, the probability is low. But never zero.

On a more serious note, I had some hopes for a gemini-assistant-home integration (I am not as skeptical towards AI tech as most of Ars readers, let's say just moderately skeptical). However since it is mostly about cameras, I have absolutely no use for it.
I mean - and that's it? Just trying to recognise objects and aggregate notifications in other wording? AND only for subscribers? Pfffft. pass.

 

[Schpyder]

Yet, the stock markets and companies are eating up everything AI. It seems to be more like mass hysteria than good investing. Between this and the political situation that is destroying the world's faith in the U.S., I keep wondering what I can do differently to avoid what seems the likely end result from all this.

Maybe I'm overreacting, it's hardly the first time that Google has launched a product that looks like it will fail, and markets are certainly punishing Meta right now. Maybe the markets will correct rapidly once it becomes apparent that AI does not automatically result in increased profitability.

It was mentioned before, but the fundamental issue is that the rich are too rich. Or to be less glib, the decades of deregulation and tax cuts on the investor class have funneled enough money to the top that they've run out of things to invest in. Or rather, they've run out of things to invest in that result in the same sort of ROI as buying Apple on Jobs's return, or getting in on the Google or Facebook IPOs. They've been desperately chasing the Next Big Thing since the smartphone revolution, and have been willing to throw good money after bad trying to make fetch happen until it's abundantly clear to almost everyone that it won't. Of course, they'll manage to cut their losses early, and leave the rest of us holding the bag while they go find the next fad to pump and dump.

 

[Paul_in_Maine_USA]

At my house in the woods, a deer in the house could happen.

Now the real estate agents are featuring deer here.

"...many sellers and real estate agents..include photos of wild animals — either from a game camera or photos the sellers captured — in current online property listings." Here’s why you might see photos of deer in Maine real estate listings -- www.bangordailynews.com

Lessee... I got a great picture of a Porcupine at face level in my pear tree. I got moose tracks. I got turkey poop, bear poop too. I got great pictures of salamanders and (deceased) star-nose moles.