Google upgrades its Gemini voice assistant on Home devices with a new Storytime feature that enables families to craft custom, interactive stories, alongside broader language support and smarter smart-home functionalities.
Google is adding a more playful side to Gemini for Home, rolling out a Storytime feature that lets families build custom adventures with voice prompts, interrupt the tale to change the plot and even remix familiar fairy tales on the fly. According to Google’s Home update, the new experience is designed to be interactive rather than passive, with prompts such as asking Gemini to invent a story about a child’s trip to Jupiter or to swap a classic villain for something more surprising.
The update also makes everyday voice commands more flexible. Google says alarms and timers should now better understand how people naturally speak, including simple descriptions such as setting a timer for a soft-boiled egg, while also handling both 12-hour and 24-hour clock preferences more reliably. The company has also improved the accuracy of time-remaining queries, a small but practical refinement for households that use smart speakers for cooking, routines and reminders.
Beyond voice features, Google is widening access to automations in the Google Home app. The company says support is expanding to more countries and languages, including Russian in Russia, Thai in Thailand, Turkish in Turkey and Vietnamese in Vietnam, while Arabic, English, French and Spanish are available across the expanded markets. Google has also been building out Gemini for Home more broadly, with official support materials describing it as a replacement for Google Assistant on compatible speakers and displays, with smarter natural-language control and improved smart-home handling.
Camera and security tools are getting a round of upgrades too. Google says users can now connect more brands, including Eufy, Tapo, Wyze, Reolink and Nanit, and save event clips more easily from the camera view. For Home Premium Advanced subscribers, the app now surfaces AI-generated event summaries in full-screen camera mode, while other changes include a more direct default view for camera timelines, automatic full-screen playback when rotating a phone and stability improvements for longer live streams and quicker reconnects after signal drops. Google also says it has fixed several smaller issues, including a lingering light ring on the Google Home Speaker, a Spotify outage in late July and reliability problems with compatible smart locks.
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