- Google Home rolls out Gemini to 16 more regions
- Despite this, users still experience performance issues with the commands
- A handful of users shared their thoughts on Reddit, but Google tweaked the experience
After six months of waiting, Google Home is finally expanding its Gemini early access program to countries beyond the United States, Canada, and Mexico, but users aren’t exactly getting along with the updated voice assistant.
The company shared a post on the Google Nest community site specifying that it will roll out Gemini for Home in 7 new languages in the following 16 countries:
- Austria
- Belgium
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Ireland
- Italy
- The Netherlands
- Norway
- Spain
- Suede
- Swiss
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Japan
- New Zealand
As mentioned, the rollout is still in Early Access, so you’ll only have access to Gemini for Home on your Google speaker or smart display if you sign up through the Google Home app, as 9to5Google says.
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The move is part of the company’s massive overhaul of Google Assistant, its longtime virtual assistant on Google’s many smart home devices, including the Google Nest Audio and the Google Nest Hub smart display. Google announced the replacement in October 2025, but the rollout hasn’t been the smoothest and users have faced major issues that have yet to be resolved.
“I came back to Google Assistant”
Users had hoped that the Gemini for Home upgrade would be the answer to a smoother smart home experience, but it turns out that’s far from the case. On the contrary, Google Home device owners have called it a “downgrade,” as one Reddit thread puts it, but why do users hate it so much?
A common problem among Google Home users is slow and sometimes absent responses to home commands. As one user shared, it took 7-10 seconds before Gemini took action after asking it to turn on a light; “The triggering of my welcome commands is so slow that it is almost useless,” they claimed. And the same goes for routines, as another frustrated user pointed out: “Worst case scenario, it’s about a five minute delay, but lately it’s about ten seconds.”
The increase in these common bugs hasn’t convinced users that Gemini for Home is a suitable enough model to replace Google Assistant, which a handful of users say is arguably the best. As a result, users are looking for ways to get back to using their predecessor, the voice assistant, but Google has promised a series of much-needed upgrades as it rolls out Gemini for Home globally.
With the next phase of Gemini for Home’s global expansion, the tech giant revealed that it has refined the Gemini experience based on user feedback. In addition to updating Family Experience support and reducing verbosity 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 contextual intelligence to distinguish between different devices in your smart home ecosystem.
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