How I turned my Pixel into the Nest Hub Google never made

Google’s smart speaker lineup is going through a rough patch. There has been no new smart display launched in over half a decade, and the only new device announced was the Home Speaker, which has nothing special about it except that it runs Gemini out of the box. And Gemini for Home isn’t something to gloat about. I’m particularly disadvantaged because neither Gemini for Home nor a single Google smart speaker is available in India, leaving the whole wide market for Amazon Alexa to capture.

Since I have a bunch of smart home devices that play nicer with Google’s smart speakers and dearly wanted a new Assistant/Gemini-powered smart display, I decided to take things into my own hands. I repurposed my Pixel into an always-on, always-listening smart screen with all the smarts of Gemini. It sounded doable in theory — I thought, what could even go wrong?

But after this experiment, I can firmly say A LOT.

What the setup looked like

Turning your Pixel into a smart display for your nightstand takes a bit of prep work. For starters, you need a recent Pixel handset that supports multiple screensavers — that means Pixel 9 and newer. While you can make the screensaver work even on wired charging, I prefer a cleaner, wire-free nightstand setup, which is why I used a Qi2 charger with my Pixel. With the basics sorted, it was time to put everything on the software side in place.

I customized the screen saver settings to neatly display the time, so I didn’t need to squint in the middle of the night without my glasses on. Besides that, I added additional screensavers to show the weather, Home controls, and my hand-picked photo albums. You can swipe through each of these screens to see whatever you want at the moment — like on my desk, it cycled through all my family photos while I occasionally checked the weather before stepping out.

There are a handful of other little things that needed to be checked, like making sure ‘Hey Google’ detection was enabled even on the lock screen for Gemini to work. Since the Home controls on the lock screen can only show favorites, I had to set them up beforehand. And turning on Auto-rotate screen lets you see the screensavers in landscape orientation, which I prefer to portrait mode.

With everything in place, my Pixel felt all set to take on the Gemini-powered Nest Hub that Google hasn’t shipped in all these years. But as I started to use this setup for all my smart home needs, replacing a dedicated Home Mini speaker, the cracks started to show pretty quickly.

The broken experience

It felt like Google had given me all the ingredients I needed to put together a Nest Hub replacement with a spare Pixel, but it ended up being a disjointed setup where each element wouldn’t talk to the others. There were numerous little gripes that came together to mar the entire experience. At the end of it, I was glad to have my Home Mini back — which itself has degraded in response and action quality over the years.

Firstly, those screensavers don’t automatically switch based on what I may need or when. And swiping between them requires you to position your finger at the very edge of the phone; otherwise, it would frustratingly swipe to the lock screen — it’s so unintuitive to figure that out that I had to Google it. Furthermore, the screensavers themselves need a bit of polishing, as some text overlaps. For example, the charging status appears over the weather text even when it’s turned off in settings. There were a few more bugs here and there, like the screensaver randomly disappearing within seconds, which I could fix by removing one of the screensavers and adding it back.

An even more broken Gemini

Coming to the heart of any smart display: the chatbot. If my time using Gemini to control smart home devices is any evidence, I’d very much like to keep the old Google Assistant until Google lets me. The Gemini experience on the lock screen feels half-baked to begin with. There is no dedicated interface — the same bottom bar appears in one corner of the screen, and there’s a strange bug that frequently prevents it from returning to the screensaver after it’s finished responding to you.

It’s quite evident that Gemini hasn’t been tuned enough to handle smart home requests just yet. While Google Assistant operated within set limits, Gemini calls the world its oyster. That’s a good trait to have when you actually want it to explain a difficult science concept or go back and forth during a history lesson, but not for handling relatively minor, everyday requests. When I ask it to turn off a smart appliance, it has to ping its large language model only to come back after a long wait to take an action that Google Assistant almost instantly executes.

A bigger miss is the lack of continued conversation on mobile, which has been a signature feature of Google Assistant for as long as I can remember, unless you switch to Gemini Live. That alone feels like such a downgrade coming from Google Assistant.

I am not going to dwell on other nitpicks like the lack of room awareness and terrible microphone sensitivity because this is a makeshift setup and not a dedicated smart screen, so I won’t hold it against Gemini in those areas. However, it does make me want to have a dedicated smart screen from Google all the more.

Give me my smart display already, Google

Even Apple has now announced its smart display with Siri AI, which supports far fewer smart home devices, but Google is yet to refresh its own. Google’s entire smart speaker product portfolio consists of the Home Speaker, which pales in comparison to its Amazon Echo counterparts. Even some budget Amazon speakers have a smart home hub, mesh extender, and ambiance sensors built in, actually putting the word smart in smart speaker.

While I reckon that Alexa offers a far superior smart home experience, given the degraded state of Google Assistant and buggy Gemini for Home, having Echo speakers means that I can’t use YouTube Music to listen to my playlists or control my Google TVs. My smart home setup was built around Google’s ecosystem, and it’s just sad that Google isn’t bothered about having a proper, up-to-date portfolio, where Amazon wins hands down.

That should ideally be all the more reason for Google to launch its own smart display. I wouldn’t even need to jump through so many hoops if it made one. Moreover, Gemini for Home can easily alleviate a lot of my concerns, including things like continued conversation, which it natively supports without Gemini Live. Hopefully, Google is working on new hardware internally, and the new Apple HomeView proves to be the kick-start it needs to unveil those devices sooner rather than later.