Google Nest Doorbell (battery)
- Wi-Fi
Verified September 2026
Great on-device person/parcel/animal detection and 3 hours of free event history, but the HA experience is the worst of the bunch: the cloud nest integration needs a one-off $5 Google Device Access registration and a fiddly Cloud Console setup, and there's no local stream — just an event-triggered clip preview. Battery life is the other catch: Google's own figures are 1 month at a busy front door, up to 6 months somewhere quiet, worse than the Ring Battery Doorbell's 6-12 month general estimate. Both are cloud-only with decent night vision; if you're not already deep in Google Home, Ring's HA integration is the less painful pick.
In Home Assistant
| Control | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Doorbell chime | Event | Fires when the button is pressed; the only entity guaranteed instant, reliable delivery. |
| Person detected | Event | The sole detection category with any specificity; there is no separate package, animal, or vehicle event despite the device doing that classification on-device for the Nest app. |
| Motion detected | Event | Fires on any movement, including non-person triggers like passing cars or blowing branches. |
| Sound detected | Event | Fires on loud/unusual noise near the doorbell. |
| Camera | Camera | Live view only — no RTSP stream, no recording, and no on-demand snapshot support; usable image data comes from the clip preview attached to each event, not a continuous feed. |
The nest integration exposes detections as generic event entities rather than binary sensors, and the underlying API only publishes motion, person, sound and chime traits — so the package, animal and vehicle labels the Nest app shows on-device never reach Home Assistant; person detection is the most specific trigger you actually get. The camera entity is live-view only with no RTSP fallback and doesn't support recording or on-demand snapshots, so a working automation has to fire on the person-detected event and use its attached clip preview rather than pulling a live snapshot. Once the Device Access OAuth grant is configured, token refresh runs unattended, but forum threads repeatedly flag a misconfigured cloud pub/sub topic as the cause of entities getting stuck unavailable.
Specs
- power
- battery or wired
- storage
- cloud (3h event history free, Nest Aware from £6/month)
- detection
- on-device person/package/animal/vehicle
- ip rating
- IP54
- dimensions
- 160 x 46 x 24mm, 206g
- resolution
- 960x1280 (3:4), up to 30fps, HDR, H.264
- setup note
- HA requires Google Device Access ($5 one-time) + cloud project
- battery life
- Google's own estimate: ~1 month in a busy spot (25-30 events/day), ~2.5 months typical (13-16 events/day), up to 6 months in a quiet spot (2-5 events/day)
- field of view
- 145° diagonal