Google updated how Google Home identifies people in your home on June 23, 2026. The update lets the camera recognize household members by their clothing, the way they walk, and their body shape — not just their face. This only works for people you have already set up in your home's recognition system.

Here's how it worked before: When a family member walked past the camera, Google Home would recognize their face and send you a notification saying who arrived. If they turned away from the camera, wore a hat, or came from an angle where the camera couldn't see their face clearly, the system couldn't tell who they were and would just send a generic "someone is here" alert.

Now the system can recognize people in more situations. If a family member walks away from a front-door camera, or a child approaches from the side yard at an angle that never shows their face, the system can still identify them based on clothing and how they move.

There is a privacy concern worth understanding. Facial recognition already raises important questions about how personal information is stored and used. Body-based recognition — using clothing and gait — is not yet as closely regulated by law, but it can identify someone just as effectively. If you turn this feature on, the camera can now recognize people based on a wider range of physical details than before.

Google says that this recognition happens on your device or within your own home network, not sent to Google's servers. Even so, it is important to know that the system now uses more types of physical information to identify people in your home.

The practical result is that you should get more reliable notifications about who is arriving at your home. The question that hasn't been answered yet is how confident the system is when it identifies someone using only clothing and body shape, not their face. Google hasn't shared those details.

Smart home cameras have been getting better at identification for years. They started with just detecting motion, then learned to spot people, then could recognize faces, and now can use body shape and clothing too. This trend will likely continue. As cameras get better at identifying people, privacy advocates and lawmakers will keep paying attention to what information these systems collect and how that information is used. For now, if you use Familiar Faces, this update should make your notifications more reliable. But it also shows how much these cameras can learn about people in your home.