The Vergecast Google's extreme smart home makeover
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Oct 7, 2025 Anish Kattukaran, a Google executive steering smart home innovations, discusses the ambitious Gemini integration meant to revamp Google Home. He reveals why Google still cares about smart homes and how the new AI aims to enhance user experience. Vee Song, a journalist covering fitness tech, shares insights on Peloton's new hardware, including an expensive treadmill and AI-powered training features. The dialogue also explores the community dynamics of Peloton and the practicality of managing multiple smartwatches.
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Gemini As The Smart‑Home Inflection
- Google sees the smart home as a way to deliver a fundamentally new conversational interaction at home.
- Gemini is the technological inflection they expect will finally realize that long-standing vision.
Leader Who Lives With Many Devices
- Anish says he has 150–200 smart devices in his own home from years of accumulation.
- He read user communities and empathized with frustrations about broken features and migrations.
Partner And Build Platform Tools
- Build platform tools and partner where hardware breadth matters instead of making every device yourself.
- Use SDKs, APIs and standards like Matter to enable partners and broaden consumer choice.