- Google Home is rolling out Gemini to 16 more regions
- Despite this, users are still experiencing performance issues with commands
- A handful of users have aired their thoughts on Reddit, but Google has been fine-tuning the experience
After a six-month wait, Google Home is finally expanding its Gemini early access program to countries outside of the US, Canada, and Mexico, but users aren’t quite getting along with the updated voice assistant.
The company shared a post on the Google Nest Community site detailing that it will be rolling out Gemini for Home in 7 new languages to the following 16 countries:
- Austria
- Belgium
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Ireland
- Italy
- Netherlands
- Norway
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Japan
- New Zealand
As mentioned, the rollout is still in early access, so you’ll only get access to Gemini for Home on your Google smart speaker or display if you opt in through the Google Home app, as 9to5Google puts it.
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The move is part of the company’s massive overhaul of Google Assistant, its long-time virtual assistant across Google’s slew of smart home devices, including the Google Nest Audio and the Google Nest Hub smart display. Google announced the replacement back in October 2025, but the rollout hasn’t been the smoothest, and users have been faced with major issues that have yet to be resolved.
“I switched 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 this is far from the case. If anything, Google Home device owners have called it a ‘downgrade’ as one Reddit thread puts it, but why are users hating it so much?
A common issue among Google Home users relates to the slow and sometimes absent responses to home commands. As one user shared, they experienced a 7-10 second delay before Gemini took action after asking it to turn on a light; “It is so slow to trigger my home commands, it’s almost worthless”, they claimed. And the same goes for routines, as another frustrated user pointed out, ‘In the worst cases, it’s like a five-minute delay, but lately it’s around like ten seconds’.
The rise in these common bugs hasn’t convinced users that Gemini for Home is a suitable enough model to replace Google Assistant, which, according to a handful of users, is arguably the better one. As a result, users are seeking ways to revert to using the voice assistant predecessor, but Google has promised a series of much-needed upgrades in Gemini for Home’s global rollout.
With the next phase of the global expansion of Gemini for Home, the tech giant revealed it’s been fine-tuning the Gemini experience based on user feedback. In addition to updating support for the family experience and reducing verbosity to ensure more natural interactions, Google says it’s reduced smart home latency by 40% for speedier responses to voice commands, as well as improving Gemini’s context-aware intelligence to distinguish between the different devices in your smart home ecosystem.
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rowan.davies@futurenet.com (Rowan Davies)
