Ring cameras are getting an AI update that can tell you what’s happening at your front door and show you. Video Descriptions is a new feature that generates text descriptions of motion activity on Ring doorbells and cameras.
Now, instead of the “Front door: person detected” alarm, you’ll get something like “Person with broom and mop coming out”. Or instead of “Living room: motion detected” you might get “dog tearing up paper towels on carpet”. You can see how useful this can be; you probably don’t need to do anything with the former, but the latter case requires some action.
These new descriptive notifications will appear in your camera notifications on your phone, so you can see right away if you need to click on them and wait for the video to load.
The Video Descriptions feature began beta testing today, June 25, for Ring Home Premium customers in the U.S. and Canada (English only) and will work on all currently available Ring doorbells and cameras, according to Ring.
These new descriptive notifications will appear in your camera notifications on your phone, so you can see right away if you need to click on them and wait for the video to load.
Video Descriptions launches today, June 25, in beta to Ring Home Premium customers in the U.S. and Canada (English only) and will work on all currently available Ring doorbells and cameras, according to Ring.
Video Descriptions joins Smart Video Search on Ring cameras, which was launched late last year and allows users to ask cameras about recent events through the app, such as “did the kids leave their bikes in the driveway?” Both artificial intelligence tools are available with a Ring Home Premium subscription ($19.99 per month), which also includes a 24/7 recording option.
Siminoff says Ring plans to use video descriptions to create more proactive home security features, including combining multiple motion alerts into a single notification and, more ambitiously, developing custom anomaly alerts.
This will allow “to generate alerts only when something happens on your property that is an anomaly,” he said, explaining that Ring will be able to learn your home’s routine and deliver alerts only when something out of the ordinary happens. This means you might not get an alert about a person with a broom and mop leaving the house, but you will get an alert about a dog tearing up the living room.
Ring is not the only company using AI to improve camera notifications. Arlo recently launched AI-powered descriptions that it calls Event Captions. Wyze also offers them under the name Descriptive Alerts, and recently launched a No Big Deal filter that filters out all notifications except those it considers to be a priority. Last year, Google announced a Gemini-based Descriptive Alerts feature for its Google Nest cameras, but it’s only available in a public preview program and is still in a limited rollout. As with Ring, all companies require a subscription for these features.
One of the main differences from Ring is that both Google and Arlo offer facial recognition. This should make descriptive notifications more useful. Getting a notification that “Johnny is opening the car door in the driveway” is more useful than “A person is opening the car door in the driveway.”
Cameras see a lot of things you don’t need to know about, and notification fatigue is a real thing when it comes to notifications. Anything that can organize and focus them is a good thing. AI-powered smart alerts for people, pets, packages, and vehicles were the first step, and now more descriptive alerts with more information can make cameras more useful in the smart home. For example, the additional context provided by descriptions can be used by an AI service such as Alexa Plus to enable other activities in your home.
Of course, more information can lead to more privacy concerns. While detailed textual descriptions of activity make it easier for people to keep an eye on their property, they also make it easier to follow people in the home, which can be abused by unscrupulous users.
Another concern is the accuracy of both the descriptions themselves and any custom filters Ring may offer in the future. If I don’t get an alert about a person with a mop leaving my house because the AI has determined that it’s not an anomaly, but it was actually a particularly picky burglar who took a fancy $700 Dyson mop, I’m going to be very annoyed.
