The Verge’s pet-tech guide: a parrot ate a keyboard, and Google’s Pet Memory couldn’t tell the cats apart

The guide opens with an introduction describing the growing market for connected devices that feed, clean, watch and entertain pets, while cautioning that some innovations over-promise and that pets may treat expensive gadgets as prey. Alongside the parrot essay and the Google review, The Verge’s pet-tech week includes stories about Whisker’s AI-powered litter robot, taking better pet photos, upgrading a fish tank with technology, and a cat that became an “iPad kid,” according to the guide’s introduction.

In one essay, a writer in Los Angeles recounts how his Senegal parrot, Kiyo, stole the spacebar from his MacBook keyboard. The bird’s cage sits at a corner wraparound window a few feet from the writer’s desk, and the writer says he often caught Kiyo eyeing the keyboard or climbing toward it. One July afternoon, he found the parrot sitting on the laptop’s touchpad with the spacebar in its mouth. The writer had previously lost keys on a Razer Anansi keyboard to a Chihuahua about 10 years earlier. In response to the latest incident, the essay suggests using a plastic keyboard cover or giving the bird a decoy keyboard, but concludes the only reliable defense is closing and putting away the laptop. The writer says he now needs to make a Genius Bar appointment to fix the missing spacebar.

In a separate review, The Verge’s smart home reviewer tested Google’s Pet Memory, a feature for Gemini for Home that promises Nest cameras will recognize pets by name. The reviewer wanted to use it to tell which cat was at the door, confirm all pets were safely inside before dark, and personalize feeding for each feline. She installed indoor Nest Cams and entered details about her three cats, but after two weeks of testing the system still labeled all of them as Smokey, the first cat she registered. When she asked the Google Nest Hub when Smokey was last seen, it pulled up a video of the new kitten playing.

Pet Memory requires the top-tier Google Home Advanced Plan at $20 per month and, at launch, works only on indoor Nest Cams, the review said. The reviewer found the feature does not build an individual visual profile for each pet, accept training photos, or allow corrections. Providing more descriptive information, such as coat type, did not help. Nest has been able to distinguish people from pets since its Cam IQ launched in 2017, and Google later added AI-powered text alerts; Amazon’s Ring, Wyze and Apple Home have also added AI-based descriptions. Google Home is the first to offer personalized pet identification, but in this test the personalization did not work as promised.