Not long after the arrival of the latest Pixel 10 series, Google announced that several new camera features intended for Nest camera users made their way to the Google Home app.
You can now preview snapshots in camera tiles to quickly identify a camera without waiting for the live view to load. The app now displays a preview image from a previous live view for that purpose, which also creates an illusion that the camera feed loads quickly.
Google Home now prefers gestures over multiple taps when navigating through video history. For instance, you can swipe right or left on the screen to switch between the Timeline and Event List views.
You can swipe down on the middle control bar to expand/collapse the player window, or you can dismiss the camera by swiping down on the camera player.
Another change is the improved notification previews on both the Android and iOS versions of the Google Home app. Now, there is a static thumbnail with a large animated preview of the event on all camera event notifications. You can check out this animation by pressing and holding the notification on iOS or tapping on the expand arrow on Android, according to a Google blog post.
These features build on top of the recent additions made to the Google Home app and the public backlash it faced over a degraded experience. Earlier this year, the search giant added the video history quick seek ability to quickly jump 10 seconds forward or backward.
Google also made changes behind the scenes to improve live camera playback, reduce "no video available" errors, and improve camera stream reliability to reduce "camera unavailable" errors when turning a camera off and on.
Speaking of smart homes, the search giant recently announced an all-new assistant called Gemini for Home, which will offer improved natural language support and contextual awareness over Google Assistant.