After I/O 2026 talked about phones, smartwatches, XR glasses, laptops, and cars, the living room was still missing. The answer arrived on May 21, closing out I/O week: Google announces Gemini built-in, the program that brings the voice and agentic capabilities of Gemini for Home beyond the boundaries of Nest hardware.
Speaker Reference Design: the blueprint that opens the ecosystem
The structural piece is the Speaker Reference Design: a hardware blueprint letting partners build high-fidelity speakers capable of supporting the full Gemini experience — voice, multi-turn, smart-home commands, contextual agents. It's not a simple SDK integration: it includes the entire required hardware architecture, from far-field microphones to DACs to acoustic chamber design.
The first partner onboard is Walmart with the Onn brand, which last year was already first to use Google's Camera Reference Design for its consumer smart cameras. Onn manufactures low-price hardware for the US market, and bringing Gemini built-in onboard is consistent with Google's strategy: bring the AI assistant where users already shop, not just into premium Nest devices.
More partners are expected over the coming months. The program is explicitly designed to scale: any OEM with acceptable manufacturing capabilities can request access to the Reference Design and ship a Gemini-compatible speaker without having to develop the AI stack in-house.
Opening to developers: Ask Home and Nest Cam scene recognition
Alongside the hardware opening, Google announced that some of Gemini for Home's most powerful smart-home features — like Ask Home (the conversational mode for querying your home's state) and Nest Cam's intelligent scene recognition — will become available to developers via API. It's a posture shift: for years Google has kept many consumer features locked; with Gemini for Home it opens the door to anyone who wants to build custom integrations on top, both for the consumer market (third-party home-automation apps) and the commercial segment (hospitality, offices, retail).
The new $99.99 Google Home Speaker
Alongside the third-party program, Google confirmed the arrival of the new Google Home Speaker: $99.99, 360-degree sound, available spring 2026 in the United States, Canada, and several European countries. It's the first speaker in the family designed explicitly for Gemini, not a refresh of the old Nest Audio. Two color variants at launch (Hazel and Berry).
It's not a revolution device — it's a volume device. Google needs its own low-priced hardware to guarantee a reference install base while the Reference Design program raises the number of available SKUs over the next 12-24 months.
Why it matters in the I/O 2026 picture
The choice to open the smart-home ecosystem is consistent with the direction running through all of I/O 2026: open standards where it helps, own hardware where presence matters. We saw it with WebMCP and Universal Commerce Protocol on the web and shopping fronts. We see it here with the Speaker Reference Design on the smart-home front.
The strategic reading is clear. For years Google's smart-home problem has been a market dominated by Amazon Echo (consumer volume) and progressively eroded by Apple HomePod (premium iOS users). Google has tried with Nest without scaling to Amazon's numbers. Opening the Reference Design is a way to acknowledge that the real asset isn't the speaker hardware, it's the Gemini voice and the agentic context — and that they're worth letting run on any speaker, as long as Google supplies the brain.
Context note: on May 5, 2026, two weeks before I/O, Google had already taken another step in the same direction, upgrading Gemini for Home from Gemini 2 to 3.1 on existing Nest speakers and displays. That update doesn't technically fall among the I/O announcements but completes the picture: Google is investing serially in the smart home in 2026, not episodically.