Google’s Pet Memory forgot who my cats are

What happened

One of the best things my smart home does is help me care for my pets, and security cameras are particularly useful for keeping track of my many critters. But the barrage of notifications they send often means I miss important ones. So, when Google announced its new Pet Memory feature for Gemini for Home, I thought this could be the perfect solution.

Amazon’s Ring, Wyze, and Apple Home (via its HomeKit Secure Video) have also recently added AI-powered descriptions, and these often include the type of animal detected (not always correctly). But Google Home is the first to personalize it. However, there are limitations, and, of course, a cost.

Pet Memory requires the top-tier Google Home Advanced Plan at $20 a month, and while it’s part of Google Home, it currently only works on Nest cameras. It also only works on indoor Nest Cams, so it wasn’t any use for my idea of an upgraded digital pet door.

I decided to set up a few indoor Nest Cams in strategic spots, hoping I could use Pet Memory to easily check which cats were inside. I thought it could help make sure everyone is safely home before dark. ” But despite telling Google Home what my three cats look like, it insisted they were all Smokey, the first cat I told it about.

Asking the Google Nest Hub when Smokey was last spotted pulled up an adorable video of the new kitten playing in my daughter’s room. From my testing, Pet Memory doesn’t appear to build an individual visual profile for each pet. There’s no training process, no opportunity to upload photos of my cats, and no way to correct mistakes.

You enter a name and breed, and it tries to figure out the rest. I tried giving it more information — Boone is a tuxedo cat with white paws, Osa the kitten is a tabby cat, and Smokey is a large gray-and-white cat — but it said it couldn’t process the extra detail and kept labeling every cat as Smokey.

But with a Nest Cam, I wanted to see if I could set it to dispense the right amount of food when it saw a specific cat — helping keep each from overeating without needing RF tags or other proprietary solutions smart pet feeders offer (my cats don’t do collars). I typed what I wanted it to do into the Ask Home chatbot in the app.

“Run my Aqara ‘Feed Smokey’ scene whenever the Nest Cam in the laundry room sees Smokey,” and it set it up for me. I then created a separate one for Boone. I ran into several issues.

Why it matters

Pet Memory promises to teach your Google Home smart home who your pets are, allowing connected Nest cameras to go beyond simply telling you they saw an animal to which animal they saw. It can then use that knowledge to adapt your smart home to your pet.

My plan was to use it to keep a digital eye on my three cats while working in my home office, distinguish them from one another, and automate their feeding based on who was at the feeder. But after two weeks of testing, Google’s AI still can’t tell my three cats apart.

My house is on a suburban, three-quarter-acre lot in a quiet neighborhood, and I take full advantage of all this space to have as many animals as possible (my husband has already said no to a goat and horse). But I’ve managed to wrangle a flock of free-ranging chickens, a large, counter-surfing Wirehaired Pointing Griffon called Gus, two indoor/outdoor cats, and — most exciting of all — a new kitten.

As The Verge’s smart home reviewer, I test a lot of connected tech and have found my best use case for security cameras is monitoring my pets around my house and yard. They help keep the chickens safer from predators and my lunch safer from Gus, and act as a type of digital pet door for the cats.

When I get a notification that there’s an animal at the door via a video doorbell and/or outdoor camera, it’s likely a cat wants to come in. While I only have one dog and I don’t really need to distinguish the chickens by name, there were three things I thought Pet Memory could do to help me manage my three cats.

First, identify which cat wanted in, and help prevent false alerts — such as when it’s my neighbor’s cat sitting on my porch, or when it’s a chicken peering in at the back door. Second, tell me whether all my pets were safely inside before dark. And finally, provide personalized automated feeding for each feline. Recognizing individual pets is the latest step in a rapid evolution of smart security cameras.

While some dedicated pet cams promise facial recognition, most standard security cameras could only alert you to motion until recently. Advances in machine learning and now generative AI are bringing more descriptive alerts. Instead of just announcing “motion alert,” cameras can increasingly tell you exactly what they saw, without you having to open the app and wait for a clip to load.

Nest has long been ahead of the game here, especially when it comes to critters. Its Nest Cam IQ, launched in 2017, could distinguish people from pets, and Google later brought animal detection to Nest cameras. More recently, Google added text descriptions that use AI to describe what the camera sees.

What to watch

I asked Google why the system didn’t seem to be working as intended, but the company hasn’t responded with any details. Still, I persisted in trying to get some use out of the feature, attempting to use Pet Memory to make my Aqara Pet Feeder smarter. I had previously set it up to trigger when Aqara’s G3 camera saw an animal, as it can’t identify species, let alone individuals.