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Make Your Home Doorbell Smarter with Google Gemini

4 min readDec 26, 2023

In this tutorial, I would like to share a simple hack to make your home video doorbell smarter with Google Gemini. Basically I want to get notified from my doorbell with a voice which describes the person coming to my home. I have been looking forward to this for a while and now this is possible, thanks to Google Gemini as it has a free vision API key at the moment.

Components

For this setup, you need the following components:

Home Assistant. I have this running on my Raspberry Pi 4.

A video doorbell. I am using Eufy in this case.

A Google Home.
Gemini Pro Vision free API key.
Another Raspberry Pi 4 to feed the image to Google Gemini and cast it to Google Home.

Setup

Gemini API Key

Get the Gemini Pro Vision free API key from https://makersuite.google.com/app/apikey

Click Create API key in new project and save the key.

Reference to the Google Gemini REST API:

Quickstart: Get started with Gemini using the REST API | Google AI for Developers

If you want to quickly try out the Gemini API, you can use curl commands to call the methods in the REST API. The…

ai.google.dev

Setup Doorbell in Home Assistant

We need to setup the doorbell in Home Assistant so we can get the doorbell event image, for instance, image.doorbell_event_image.. If you are using Eufy…