TL;DR
- Google Home is working on custom, user-described camera events — a field where you type what you want a camera to look out for — alongside an AI-style “explain my home’s presence” diagnostic for Home & Away.
- Today, camera notifications are limited to preset categories, and there’s no in-app way to ask why your Home & Away presence is behaving oddly.
- We found the code in Google Home v4.18.45, pulled from a Pixel running the Android 17 QPR beta. It isn’t live yet, and like any work-in-progress code it could change or never ship.
Google Home has spent the past year quietly turning into a Gemini delivery vehicle, from natural-language automations to AI summaries of what your cameras saw. Most of that has arrived in measured drips rather than big launches. Now, a teardown of the latest beta — Google Home v4.18.45, which we pulled straight off a Pixel and diffed against the previous v4.17.56 build — points to two more AI-flavored additions in the works, neither of which Google has announced.
Tell your camera what to watch for
The more interesting find is a set of new strings around what looks like custom, described camera events. Right now, a Nest camera can alert you to a fixed menu of things — people, packages, vehicles, animals. The new code suggests Google wants to let you describe what matters to you in your own words, and have the camera watch for that instead.
The tell is a validation error: invalid_custom_camera_event_query_empty_error_subtitle resolves to “Missing description” — the kind of message you only need if there’s a free-text box where a user types what the camera should look for. A second string, camera_resource_exhausted_error, hints that the feature leans on a backend that can be rate-limited or temporarily unavailable, which is consistent with an AI-powered detection service rather than a simple on-device toggle.
To be clear about the limits: we found this in the code, but we couldn’t surface it in the app yet. The build came from an unrooted device, and a feature like this is almost certainly gated behind a server-side flag, so there’s nothing to show on screen at this stage.
‘Explain my home’s presence’
The second addition is squarely a Gemini-style touch. A new banner query, presence_vitals_banner_query, is literally the phrase “explain my home’s presence,” paired with banner text telling you that “Home & Away needs to be improved” and prompting you to tap to correct your presence settings.
Home & Away — the feature that decides whether anyone’s home so routines can fire — has always been a bit of a black box: when it gets your presence wrong, there’s no obvious way to find out why. These strings suggest Google is building a natural-language diagnostic that can explain what’s tripping up presence detection and walk you toward a fix, rather than leaving you to guess.
The evidence
The new strings in Google Home v4.18.45:
presence_vitals_banner_query = "explain my home's presence"
presence_vitals_banner_text = "Home & Away needs to be improved. Tap to
correct your presence settings..."
invalid_custom_camera_event_query_empty_error_subtitle = "Missing description"
camera_resource_exhausted_error = "Couldn't connect to camera. Try again later."What’s not new here
The same build also adds og_ai_account_fallback_label (“AI account”) and og_ai_tier_label_format (“AI %1$s account”), which at a glance look like a Google Home feature. They aren’t. The og_ prefix marks them as part of the shared OneGoogle account menu — the account switcher that appears across Google’s apps — and we found the exact same strings landing in the Google Cloud Console app at the same time. In other words, that’s an account-wide label for your Google AI plan rolling out everywhere, not something specific to Home.
None of this is live, and Google hasn’t said a word about either the custom camera events or the presence diagnostic. We’ll keep an eye on future Home betas and update if and when they surface.
While Google previously introduced Gemini-powered ‘AI Camera Search‘ to let users comb through past footage using natural language, this new leak takes things a step further. Instead of just searching through history, users will soon be able to set proactive, custom text prompts for real-time alerts—effectively allowing you to tell your Nest Cam exactly what unique events to watch out for.
