The Verge's smart home reviewer tested Google's new "Pet Memory" feature for Gemini for Home, which promises to let Nest cameras recognise individual pets by name and trigger personalised alerts and automations. After two weeks of use, however, the reviewer found the AI could not reliably distinguish her three cats from one another, undermining the feature's core promise and leaving pet-specific notifications and automations largely unworkable.

The reviewer hoped Pet Memory would identify which of her cats wanted to come in, filter out false alerts from neighbouring cats or chickens, confirm all pets were safely home before dark, and enable individualised automated feeding. Instead, the system repeatedly failed to tell her cats Boone and Smokey apart, despite the household also including a dog, chickens and a new kitten used to test the feature across a range of animals.