Tag: Google

The latest version of the Google Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen)—yeah, that’s the name—is a real Jekyll and Hyde of a product. The hardware and software interface are expertly crafted and a delight to use. But once you start looking more closely at Google’s AI-forward security camera, it gets ugly and annoying.

The $150 Nest Cam Outdoor’s biggest problem is that it’s not cheap to use. Like Ring and Arlo, Google’s security camera subscription plans have gotten more expensive than ever in recent years, pressing at the boundaries of what’s affordable for people in a time when everything else is also harder to pay for. And until now, it’s done so without adding any tangible benefit.

The calculus has changed a bit for Google. The company’s subscription service, now called Google Home Premium instead of Nest Aware, has expanded beyond its core product—a month or two of cloud video storage—to become a full-on smart home suite, complete with Gemini as a buddy. I didn’t get to test Gemini’s smart speaker features, as they’re in the midst of a timid early access rollout I’m not part of, but I did get to test the AI portion of this new experience that’s come to Google’s cameras. And so far, at least, it is very much not worth $10 or $20 a month.

As bad as the AI features are, there are real things to like about the Nest Cam Outdoor, especially if you’ve enjoyed these cameras in the past. Its video feed, now in 2K resolution, is sharper than ever and delivers accurate colors by day and crisp, black-and-white infrared-lit images by night, making it easy to tell who someone is on camera. It records HDR footage at 30 fps and has a broad 152-degree diagonal field of view. That’s up from the 130-degree FOV of its battery-powered predecessor and makes it better for covering a large area like my backyard. Because the camera connects to the base magnetically, it’s very easy to point it where you want to. It’s also just a nice-looking piece of hardware, even if Google hasn’t really updated its appearance in many years.

There’s no floodlight on the new Nest Cam Outdoor—instead, a pair of infrared LEDs light up the area as far as 20 feet in front of the camera at night. It’s got a speaker and microphone inside so you can chat with people via Google Home on an iOS or Android device. Its microphone does a good job picking up voices on the other end, and its speaker is clear, but not any louder than those of other cameras like this.

Installation is as dead simple as that of an outdoor wired camera can be. You don’t connect this product directly to your house; a short cable sprouts from the device itself and runs through a magnetic base that you mount to your exterior wall using a couple of screws. You plug that short cable into a longer one, which you’ll then need to route through a window, door, or hole in the wall to an interior outlet. You can also plug it into an outdoor outlet, of course, if you’re not concerned about it being so easy to get to. Either way, it’s not as elegantly wire-free as battery-powered or hardwired cameras are, but at least it’s easy to set up.

As for its software, you’ll configure and use the camera via the clean, easy-to-navigate Google Home app. There are several features standard on security cameras like this; you can set up specific zones for different recording and notification behaviors on the screen, or crop the image closer and keep it that way. If you want to talk to someone in sight of the camera, you can do that, and it’ll come through nice and clear. It’s easy to poke through recorded events, which sit just below the camera’s live feed in the app. The camera’s settings are few but useful, including options to configure night vision or rotate the chassis 180 degrees if it’s mounted upside-down.

The Nest Cam Outdoor, with or without a paid subscription, does the everyday security camera things well. It never took more than 10 seconds for the Google Home app to notify me when something happened in my backyard, and it was generally good at identifying animals and people—although there’s an asterisk on that animal part, which I’ll get to later. It also does something I wish every camera did: it stops sending notifications if it detects the same kind of event repeatedly in a short span of time, so your phone won’t just buzz incessantly when someone is doing yard work. While I wish there were a way to tweak how this works or turn it off entirely, it’s a welcome feature.

The product does lack a few features that are common on this type of camera. Unlike the similarly priced Reolink Altas and cheaper Ring Outdoor Cam, there’s no siren, nor do you get the option to black out sections of the image—for example, if you don’t want the camera to record your neighbors’ houses. The most disappointing thing is that Google continues to refuse to offer local storage. You get six hours of cloud-based video history—that is, you can see any clips the camera recorded in the past six hours, which is double what the company had offered in the past and still not enough to make up for the omission of local storage. Anything more, and you’re on the hook for a subscription plan that’s only cheaper than streaming TV because it costs too much now.

The AI of it all

Google has always lost me at its security camera storage approach, and that’s not just because of the price—$10 a month for 30 days of history and $20 a month for 60 days’ worth is heftier than Ring’s subscriptions, though roughly in line with what Arlo asks for. It’s fine for companies to charge for cloud storage, but only if there are other options—see the microSD card slots of the old Netatmo Presence or the Reolink Elite, or hub storage approaches like Eufy’s HomeBase. In all of those cases, you can browse your local storage via those companies’ apps. In the case of both Netatmo and Reolink, even if you’re having trouble seeing recordings in the app, you can always snatch the microSD card and look at recordings on your computer. The very existence of all of that as baseline-free features makes Google’s cloud subscription-only approach seem deeply cynical.

Of course, as I said above, there’s more to Google Home Premium than just cloud video storage. If you pay for the pricier Google Home Premium Advanced plan, you get the promise of AI features that let you pinpoint specific moments by searching your video history using vague, natural language in the Google Home app. You can also opt into 10 days of searchable, 24/7 video history and get AI summaries that resemble Apple Intelligence summaries on iOS. (We know how well those work.)

The absolute best part of all of this is that you can search that continuously recorded footage, and it will pick up clips even if they weren’t actually recorded as events. Toss out searches like “person carrying a box” or “me in a hat,” and you’ll get real matches. But don’t expect miracles—I wanted to see if it could tell me where I’d left my phone, so I asked if it had seen anyone leave a phone outside. It surfaced three clips of me walking outside and looking at my phone from days prior, but not a moment from that day when I had set a smartphone on a table in front of the camera. When I asked, “What about today?” it responded, “I don’t track personal items like phones.” Rude!

Google’s system does a decent job sending notifications when it sees a person or an animal, as cameras have for many years; the difference now is that it also tells you what they’re doing. So instead of “person spotted” or whatever, it says “a person exited the house,” or it might say that “a cat walked along the path towards the house.” It gets the details wrong a lot, though, like telling me a person left the house when they’ve only opened the door to let dogs out to pee, or repeatedly misidentifying the pets—dogs as cats and vice versa.

I could live with those issues, but things are more broken when you get to the “Home Brief” feature, which did surprisingly well, like when it said a person (me) was “observed carrying an Amazon package” in the garage, although it also said I set the box down, which I didn’t. Another time, it, uh, made it seem like my house was under siege:

“Wednesday began with a black cat running towards the house and sitting by the door in the morning. Several dogs, including a brown and white one and a black dog, were also seen walking along the path and into the yard. Around midday, various dogs, including a black dog and a brown dog wearing a blue vest, were observed walking along the path.

In the afternoon, a person wearing a teal jacket departed the house, followed shortly by someone with a backpack entering. The evening saw a cat exiting the house, and later, multiple instances of people exiting the house, sometimes accompanied by a dog. A person was also seen carrying a box and a bag, sitting down to look into the box, before another person in a hoodie entered. The day concluded with more arrivals, including a person carrying an object and someone with a backpack entering the house.”

Cue the Star Wars: The Last Jedi meme in which Luke tells Rey, “Impressive; every word in that sentence is wrong.” The black cat was actually my dog. There weren’t several or various dogs; just two. The person in a teal jacket and the one with a backpack were the same. And that bit at the end was me taking out the trash—I never sat down or looked into the box I was taking out to the recycling bin.

I like the idea of this feature, but the execution—as ever, when AI isn’t ready for the task it’s being given—comes off sloppy and unfinished. Some of the problems could be fixed with wording tweaks to account for the fact that the AI system isn’t recognizing that when a person leaves the frame and another person enters a couple of minutes later wearing the same-colored clothes, it’s probably the same person. And it would be more useful if it only called out unusual occurrences, and if Google’s facial recognition were better at identifying me—it correctly did so a few times throughout my week of testing and otherwise only saw “a person.”

All of this is undeniably a meaningful step forward for smart home security cameras and digital smart home assistants. But it’s also so flawed, and there are so many free alternatives that are almost as good—Reolink, for example, recently debuted a similar AI search feature for some of its cameras that’s not quite as robust but is free and on-device—that it’s not worth $20 a month.

What about the $10-per-month “Standard” plan that gets you 30 days of event history, no 24/7 recording, and fewer new AI features? It does unlock facial recognition (unless you live in Illinois) and notifications for things like when you’ve left your garage door open, which I tested and which, like the AI summaries, was often wrong, telling me the garage door had opened when, in fact, it had not. To its credit, it did tell me the one time I left the door open, notifying me five times, at five-minute intervals, that I’d done so.

Oh, you also get access to Gemini via smart speakers, but again, that’s in early access for now. You’ll also get notifications if a Google smart speaker or Nest camera has heard an alarm (smoke or carbon monoxide) or breaking glass. The best new feature that comes with this subscription, though, is “Help me create,” a button in the Google Home app’s automations tab that tasks AI with creating automations for you, based on descriptions you type into a text field. Of all the AI features I tried with the Nest Cam Outdoor, this one might have worked the best, creating automations that did a great job approximating what I was going for, even with vague descriptions like “Make it look like there’s a party happening if the backyard camera detects an unfamiliar face.” The automation was far from the fake party that Kevin McCallister threw to ward off The Wet Bandits in Home Alone; it announced “It’s party time” on all my Google Home speakers and set all the lights to turn on and off in a one-minute cycle. It’s not what I would’ve done, but it took five seconds to enable and was, maybe, good enough to make someone think twice about breaking in.

Google’s AI isn’t ready to pull its weight

It’s easy to see what Google is going for with the AI upgrade to its smart home ecosystem. I would love to be able to casually ask a digital assistant where I left my phone or what time my kid got home and have it give me an accurate answer right away. It would be great if the AI models peering through my security cameras could tell me if something truly unusual happened, rather than making a mundane day of me doing a little tidying up in my garage or backyard sound like a full-on home invasion. Hell, it’d be nice just to have it tell me when it sees my dogs at the back door so I don’t have to stand there waiting for them to be done peeing.

Looking at the Google Nest Cam Outdoor not as a security camera but as eyes for Google’s Gemini AI system to see with makes a spendy subscription start to make sense—kind of—if it offers all the things I described above. But it doesn’t, and I can’t bring myself to pay $20 every month for an AI model that lies to me so often about what’s happening around my house. Especially not at a time when I’ve canceled almost every streaming service I love because I can’t afford them, and I don’t buy steak because it costs nearly double what it used to. If I’m going to spend a bunch of money on something these days, it had better be good. And the Google Nest Cam Outdoor just isn’t, with or without a subscription.