If you’ve already read my Nest Cam Outdoor (Wired, 2nd Generation) review, you’ll know that the reality, as I’ve experienced it, is disappointing. Notifications generated by Google’s Gemini AI chatbot consistently misidentified my pets and gave strange and inaccurate descriptions of the events that triggered recordings. From the daily summary of my family’s comings and goings, it seemed as if my home was surrounded by people and animals. None of this helps justify a cloud storage service that’s more expensive than a Google Home Premium (formerly Nest Aware) subscription. And without those subscriptions, the Nest Cam Outdoor doesn’t do enough to make it worth buying compared to some of the more capable, less cloud-dependent options.
Does the Google Nest Doorbell (Wired, 3rd Generation) perform better? Well, the AI features are still broken in the same way, but it may still be a better buy, depending on how deep your roots are within the walled walls of the Google Home ecosystem. However, if you’re not a big user of Google Home, it’s best to look elsewhere.
Google Nest Doorbell (Wired, 3rd Generation)
Junky AI gist and expensive subscription aside, the Nest Doorbell is great if you’re deep into the Google Home ecosystem.
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Clear, wide field of view
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Good integration with Google Home speakers and displays
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sleek design
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instant notifications
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Inconsistent AI notifications
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AI summaries are useless
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Expensive Hardware and Subscriptions
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no local storage
The Nest Doorbell may be the best looking video doorbell on the market. Its slim, bar-shaped housing is rounded at both ends, which wraps tightly around the doorbell button housing the camera and LED ring-light. The whole thing has the same gentle, pleasingly symmetrical vibe that characterizes other Google Nest cameras. It’s a lot nicer to look at than a bulky, blocky video doorbell like Ring or Eufy.
Beyond the beautiful design, Google’s third-generation wired doorbell has solid specifications like a 2K resolution camera sensor, with a generous 166-degree diagonal field of view that spans a square aspect ratio. It captures HDR video at 30 frames per second; The clips come in vibrant color during the day and, using infrared LEDs, turn black and white at night. The Nest Doorbell also has a microphone and speaker that enable two-way audio. In terms of connectivity, the camera uses both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy. Because of that fast Wi-Fi and its always-on nature, its live feed loads into the Google Home app almost instantly.
Installation is simple, assuming your door has the requisite doorbell wiring. The Nest Doorbell comes with a mounting plate and a second angled adapter that you can use if you want the camera pointed more towards people at your door. Google includes a wire extender if you need one, and the Google Home app, which you use for setup, guides you through installation.
Connecting the Nest Doorbell to the Google Home app is easy – the only place you’ll be using it, as this is an exclusively Google Home-compatible product – but a word of advice: setup requires a QR code included in the box. Lose it and you’ll have to undo all your physical installation work to get the same QR code on the back of the doorbell.
Once set up, it works like most other video doorbells. You’ll get notifications when someone presses its button, or when the Nest Doorbell detects objects – people, pets, and vehicles – that you’ve set it to notify you about. Unfortunately, if you want a zoomed-in preview of anything that triggers a recording in those notifications, as well as package detection, you’ll need a subscription. Sounds stingy, but I guess thumbnail images and machine-learning cardboard boxes don’t grow on identity trees?
Check out the Nest Doorbell (Wired, 3rd Generation) on Amazon
Despite those omissions, Google is more generous with free features for the Nest Doorbell than the Nest Cam Outdoor. For example, it works with existing mechanical and digital chimes, and if you don’t have a working chime (like me) you even have the option to use Google’s smart speaker or display. They can be configured to announce when someone has rung your doorbell and – in the case of the Google Nest Hub or Hub Max – start streaming a live feed of the camera. Through the display you can also chat with the person who rang your doorbell or, if you’re not interested in chatting, choose an automated response such as asking the delivery person to leave the payload there.
In testing, my second-generation Nest Hub was quite quick at announcing that someone had pressed a button, and it was easy enough to have a back-and-forth conversation with them. The only problem I had to deal with was the Nest Hub itself, whose interface is downright sluggish on the 2025. Still, it’s a nice integration. Now, I wish I could get it to do this on the Google TV-equipped OLED TV in my basement.
And that’s it for Nest Doorbell without a subscription. There’s no local recording, although Google has increased the time events are recorded on its servers from just three hours in previous Nest Doorbells to just six hours now. Either way, it’s a lot less than the free local storage offered for video doorbells from companies like Eufy, Reolink, Blink, and Aqara.
AI works better on doorbell cameras
If you want more than the Nest Doorbell, you’ll have to pay for a $10 or $20 per month Google Home Premium subscription. This will give you more cloud video storage history – up to 30 days or 60 days, respectively, with the latter also adding 10 days of 24/7 recordings that you can search using Gemini.
At the lower standard tier you also get facial recognition, package detection, and alerts if one of your Google Home devices hears glass breaking or smoke alarms. Those features, plus local storage, are all things that the ReoLink Elite we recently reviewed free offers. In fact, the only thing this subscription gives you that you can’t get with many other cameras is a feature called “Help me create,” which lets you create automations by describing them in a text box in the Google Home app. It worked well for creating simple automations, although one thing that bothers me is that if you ask it to do something that Google Home’s automation isn’t capable of, Gemini won’t tell you. This will only provide a non-working automation.
Ultimately, the standard plan will also include a broader rollout of Gemini to smart speakers. This includes features like Gemini Live, the back-and-forward voice chatting feature of Google’s LLM-powered assistant. As of this review, it’s best to hold off on a subscription if you want access to Gemini on your speaker, as it’s only available to a select few with early access.
To get key AI camera features like daily summaries and AI-generated notifications for events, you’ll need to subscribe to the $20/month Google Home Premium Advanced plan. You can read a lot more about my problems with these features in my review of the Nest Cam Outdoor, but to summarize: Google’s AI system has a tendency to misinterpret what’s going on in front of it, confidently misidentifies animals, and its summaries often describe a person’s comings and goings in a way that makes it feel like I’m having a house party every day.
That said, the system seems to be more accurate in terms of video doorbells, perhaps because the camera is closer to the ground and can more clearly see what’s in front of it. Or maybe it’s just because what happens in the front of my house is much more routine than what happens in the backyard — it’s not the dogs going in and out or trying to explain the meaning of people working in the yard or taking out the trash. Gemini still calls my cat dog sometimes, but when most packages were delivered he called accurately and even noted that one was from Amazon.
When these features work they’re great, and—again—as I said in my Nest Cam Outdoor review, these are a clear technological leap forward for home security cameras. But Google’s AI descriptions are still so often wrong that it’s like paying $20 a month for beta testing, and that doesn’t sound good to me. Heck, even if they’re not exactly wrong, they’re no more useful than the generic, non-AI descriptors of “person,” “person with package,” or “activity or animal” of a subscription-free experience. Additionally, AI video discovery may be great, but as Reolink Elite shows, you can get similar AI discovery from on-device AI models. Like local video storage, it feels like Google can Make a camera with on-device AI search for free, and didn’t do it because, well, more money through subscriptions is better than less money without them.
A great buy if you’re all set on Google Home
The Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd generation) serves a very specific niche – people heavily invested in the Google Home ecosystem – very well. If you have a house full of Google Nest speakers and smart displays and you like using Google Gemini for things, you’ll probably love the Nest Doorbell. And if you’re already paying for an expensive Google Home Premium plan and don’t have a Nest Doorbell or only have the first-generation model, that’s not a hassle.
But for anyone else, the Nest Doorbell isn’t meaningfully useful on its own, and the Google Home Premium subscription is a raw deal at a time when your weary dollars won’t go as far as they used to. It’s hard to feel good about paying $20 a month for useless AI summaries when I’m canceling streaming services to save money, or for AI-written notifications that might be slightly more helpful than the usual “seen by person” alerts. I’d love to buy one of the many cheap alternative video doorbells that offer local video storage and reactivate my Netflix account for a few more months with the money I’ll save.
Check out the Nest Doorbell (Wired, 3rd Generation) on Amazon
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