Google’s new Pet Memory feature for Gemini for Home promises something genuinely useful: Nest cameras that recognize your individual pets by name, not just detect that some animal wandered past. For anyone juggling multiple cats or dogs, that’s the difference between a useful alert and another notification to ignore. But after two weeks of testing, The Verge’s smart home reviewer found the feature can’t tell her three cats apart. Boone, Osa, and Smokey all registered as Smokey, the first cat she entered into the system.
The core problem is that Pet Memory doesn’t actually build an individual visual profile for each pet. There’s no training process, no way to upload photos, and no mechanism to correct mistakes. You enter a name and breed, and Google’s AI tries to figure out the rest from camera footage alone. That approach failed repeatedly in testing. Asking the Nest Hub when Smokey was last seen pulled up footage of the new kitten playing in a bedroom. The feature also only works on indoor cameras, so the idea of using it as a smart pet door that announces which cat is waiting on the porch doesn’t work.
This is the latest step in a broader shift for security cameras. Nest has been doing animal detection since 2017, and Amazon’s Ring, Wyze, and Apple Home have all added AI-powered descriptions of what cameras see. Google Home is the first to attempt personalized pet identification, but it comes with real costs. The feature requires the $20-per-month Google Home Advanced plan, and in testing it only worked on Nest cameras, not third-party devices.
The frustration here isn’t just that the feature is buggy. It’s that the concept is sound and the limitations feel artificial. If Google allowed users to upload a few photos of each pet, the identification would likely improve dramatically. Instead, the company shipped a feature that overpromises and underdelivers, leaving pet owners with a $20 monthly subscription and cameras that still can’t tell Boone from Smokey.
