Great news, everyone! If you’ve checked out our review of the Google TV Streamer and found yourself wishing for the new smart home panel—or the AI-generated ambient art—you’ll be pleased to learn that these features are on their way to additional Google TV devices. It was pretty much expected that Google wouldn’t limit these features to just its latest streaming hardware, but it’s always comforting to get an official update.
Here’s what you need to know: any smart device compatible with Google Home can be accessed via the Google Home panel on Google TV. At my place, I have several Nest cameras, a Nest doorbell, and a variety of Philips Hue and Govee lights. All of them show up in the Google Home Panel, with my favorites getting priority visibility.
While the setup is largely intuitive, there are a few minor quirks. For example, if a camera is powered off, it will display as a blank screen. This isn’t terribly helpful since you can’t turn the camera back on using Google TV—you’ll need a phone, tablet, or the Google Home web interface for that.
Notifications from the doorbell are optional. You select this feature when first setting up the Home panel, and during my tests with the Google TV Streamer, I noticed a significant delay in notifications showing up after someone rings the doorbell. Additionally, the notification images appeared distorted in a different aspect ratio.
When it comes to lighting and climate control, those functions operated exactly as I’d expect. It’s a breeze to turn devices on and off or adjust the AC settings using the remote.
Overall, this addition is a definite win for anyone using a Google TV device along with smart home accessories.
The concept of AI-generated ambient art is precisely as it sounds. Instead of choosing from your saved images in Google Photos, you can now request the AI to create art on its own—much like the feature available on Amazon Fire TV’s premium models.
You can generate personalized artwork based on your own ideas, or Google can help you kickstart your creativity with a kind of Mad Libs-style prompt where you fill in the blanks.
This feature is entertaining to experiment with, but its value really depends on how much you enjoy getting into the art creation process.
