Google Assistant Teases Face Match Feature for Nest Home Hub

The Nest Hub Max isn’t expected to hit store shelves until September 9th, but Google Assistant is already listing Face Match in its settings menu. The facial recognition feature will allow the Nest Hub Max to recognize the faces of different people when they enter the room and display calendars, alerts, and other information customized specifically for each user.

Face Match is only compatible with the Nest Hub Max, so at the moment the menu listing is essentially just for show. Google users will be able to enroll their faces and configure their devices once the Nest Hub Max becomes available.

Consumers will have to wait until then to see how the facial recognition tech measures up against smart home competitors like Amazon and Apple. The Ambient notes that the Nest Hub Max product page specifies that “a user with a similar face or a photo of your face may be misidentified as you,” so consumers may have some legitimate privacy concerns about the new device. However, it’s not yet clear how the system will work in practice.

The Nest Hub Max was first announced back in May, when Google highlighted the new facial and gesture recognition camera as one of the device’s major features. The smart home device will retail for $229.

Sources: The Ambient, Android Police, and Droid Life

Like all biometrics solutions, face recognition technology measures and matches the unique characteristics for the purposes of identification or authentication. Often leveraging a digital or connected camera, facial recognition software can detect faces in images, quantify their features, and then match them against stored templates in a database.

Face scanning biometric tech is incredibly versatile and this is reflected in its wide range of potential applications. Learn more on Mobile ID World’s Facial Recognition page.