Your Google Home widgets will now eat up less of your battery life

Google Home has been plagued by a few issues recently. For example, users have been reporting that Voice Match still struggles to reliably identify who’s speaking. For this particular issue, the tech giant is currently working on a resolution. As you wait for that fix, several other updates and improvements are coming your way right now.

In the latest release notes for Google Home, there are fixes and improvements listed across Gemini for Home, the Google Home app, and cameras. There’s also an update on Google Home Model Context Protocol (MCP). Without further ado, here are the changes you need to be aware of:

Google Home improvements

• Follow-up question behavior: Gemini now asks fewer unnecessary follow-up questions and will end conversations less awkwardly.
• Live Mode interruptions: Gemini-powered devices will stop interrupting themselves during Live Mode.
• Home app widget battery efficiency: Home app widgets will now pause background updates and polling when your phone’s screen is off, locked, or running a screensaver. This is meant to help you conserve your phone’s and camera’s battery life.
• Smoother multi-account switching: For those who use multiple accounts on Google Home, you’ll now see fewer instances of “Home not found” errors and preference resets when switching.
• More flexible in-app banners: The Google Home app has new UI for triggering actions in announcement banners.
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarm notifications: Current device status will now be shown in the Home app after an alarm has already been cleared.

Google Home fixes

• TV streaming playback: Fixed an issue that prevented Gemini from launching streaming providers on smart displays.
• Reduced broadcast errors: You can now more reliably broadcast across your whole Home.
• Playlist reliability: Fixed issues where Gemini was unable to identify and play personal playlists.
• More reliable device tile status: An issue was causing online sensors, cameras, and smoke and carbon monoxide detector tiles to appear grayed out after returning from device controller screens.
• Smart device onboarding issues: Wi-Fi pairing and several other smart device onboarding issues have been resolved.
• Google TV startup crashes: Fixed an issue causing Google TV devices to crash on startup.
• Camera livestream tile reliability: Previously, livestream tiles would temporarily turn black when returning from the full-screen camera view back to the Favorites tab. Live feeds now continue to stream when navigating back on Android.
• Camera history scrolling: On Android, scrolling past unrecorded or offline gaps in the video timeline will no longer cause freezes.
• Faster switching to live camera stream: Users on iOS will no longer encounter an issue where tapping the “Live” button while watching recorded events fails to redirect smoothly to the live view.

Google Home MCP

Earlier today, the Mountain View-based firm announced that support for the Model Context Protocol would come to Google Home. An early preview was expected to arrive in the coming weeks. However, it appears that the company is starting the early access rollout today. It will be available in English to Google Home Premium Advanced users in the US.

As a brief overview, MCP will allow your personal AI agents, such as Antigravity and OpenClaw, to interact with Google Home. For example, you could ask the agent to build a custom dashboard that provides a view of your smart home. Google notes that you’ll create a Google Cloud project and configure it to use Home MCP. From there, you need to give the agent your MCP configuration details. After signing in and granting permissions, it should all be ready to go.