Google Home will soon let you swap Gemini for Claude

Google is opening up its smart home to AI agents, letting tools like Claude and Open Claw access and control your connected devices and analyze your home's data using the standardized Model Context Protocol. Google Home MCP is a new integration that lets third-party AI agents control and monitor your smart home and act on […]. AI News Google will now let any AI agent run your smart home Google Home adds MCP integration, allowing third-party AI agents to analyze your home data, control devices, and build custom dashboards.

Google Home adds MCP integration, allowing third-party AI agents to analyze your home data, control devices, and build custom dashboards. See our ethics statement. Google is inviting third-party agents, including Claude and Open Claw, into Google Home.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Part Of All the smart home news, reviews, and gadgets you need to know about see all updates Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News. It “allows any AI agents that support MCP, including Google Antigravity, Claude, Hermes or Open Claw, to securely work with all of the devices and event history in your Google Home ecosystem,” Taylor Lehman, group product manager at Google Home & Nest, said in a blog post.

Related AI companies want a new internet — and they think they’ve found the key OpenClaw: all the news about the trending AI agent Hey Google, meet Gemini: the new voice of your smart home I used Claude to vibe-code my wildly overcomplicated smart home According to Lehman, Home MCP integration will connect your AI agent of choice to real-world events, enabling a host of new capabilities. From things like cross-camera analysis — so you could ask your agent what your kid did when they got home from school — to using device state history to figure out how many loads of laundry you did last week or how long the lights were left on. It will also allow your agent to interact with you via voice, for example, by sending an audio message over your Google Home speaker when it has finished a task.

Google Home is getting an Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, but only limited users get to try it first.

Google is launching early access to a new MCP server for Google Home, allowing AI agents like Claude, ChatGPT, and others to control connected devices, review camera summaries, and access smart home activity using natural language. Smart home owners will soon be able to control their devices connected to Google Home via an AI agent.

On Wednesday, Google rolled out early access to its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for its Google Home ecosystem, which will allow any AI agent that supports MCP — like Claude, Hermes, OpenClaw, ChatGPT, and Google Antigravity — to securely work with their smart home devices and access their event history. This update will allow people to use natural language instructions to do things like review their camera summaries, monitor smart home activity, control their connected devices, and build their own custom smart home dashboards.

To get the connection set up, users will need to create a Google Cloud project and configure it to use Home MCP. They will then provide the MCP configuration details to their agent of choice and ask it to set it up.

The agent will then ask them to sign in and grant permissions. (A setup guide will also be offered in the Google Home Developer Center.) The system will support any device in the Google Home ecosystem, including Google Nest doorbells and thermostats and “Works with Google Home” (or Matter) devices, like light bulbs.

Google already supports MCP in other areas of its business, including in its Google Cloud and data platforms, developer tools, and Google Workspace, for instance. Support for Google Home is targeted more directly at consumers who are experimenting with AI agents designed to handle everyday tasks.

The company said access to the MCP will roll out starting today and continuing over the coming weeks to subscribers who pay for Google Home Premium Advanced in the U.S. This is the more expensive, $20-per-month subscription tier that provides features like longer event-based video history, descriptive notifications and detailed alerts, tools to search video history, daily summaries, and more.

Google wouldn’t comment on if or when the MCP would roll out more broadly, such as to other subscription tiers or markets. Google is also soliciting feedback from early adopters during this period by way of its Smart Home for Developers Community, it says.

An earlier version of this post misstated the rollout’s start. It is today, Wednesday, not Tuesday.

Topics AI, Gadgets, Google, google home, Hardware, mcp When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Sarah Perez Consumer News Editor Sarah has worked as a reporter for since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb.

Before her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. Across several industries, including banking, retail and software.

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