Ring’s video history search can help me find my cat

Home Pro: Smart Video Search for All Home Pro Subscribers based on Artificial Intelligence and Visual Language Modeling, and Application to Lost Cats and Raccoons

Ring’s new Smart Video Search capability, which the company announced today, is rolling out by November 5 to all of its Home Pro subscribers, who pay $20 monthly or $200 annually. The feature was tested over the last few days. It couldn’t help but answer the question in our home: do you remember to lock the door? But searches for “dog pooping,” “gardeners,” and “rollerblading” brought up mostly accurate results.

Ring has a new smart video search that can find everything from a lost cat to a red sweater. According to Ring, the AI-powered feature can locate specific events in your Ring video history based on natural language searches, such as “a black cat at night,” “a red truck in the rain,” and “a kid riding a bike yesterday.” Compared to Ring’s current smart notifications, which can alert you to doorbell rings, people, or packages, Smart Video Search opens up a whole new level of historical insight.

Hamren says Ring blocks searches for inappropriate or offensive content. She declined to elaborate beyond saying that names of weapons and “qualitative terms about people or situations” are among those barred.

The company calls the search Ring IQ, and Eric Kuhn, GM of Ring experiences and subscriptions explained that it is a combination of Ring artificial intelligence and visual language modeling.

Several images on the ring doorbell showing visitors in red were brought up when the person typed “red sweater front door.” There is no person recognition, which is a feature offered by competitors. It just sees generic people. Adding “red sweater woman” did narrow the results down. When it runs out of relevant matches, it serves up videos related to them.

Security cameras are also useful for finding lost things. Yes, I have scrolled back through doorbell footage to see if I was carrying my purse when I left the house or when I couldn’t find my red sweater. This feature will save me a lot of scrolling time.

The feature can perform a search through your entire history, up to 180 days, with some limitations. I tried searching for possums and raccoons, as I have a lot of late-night backyard visitors. This was less successful than my cat search. A lot of the videos were of my dog and cat. There were blurry images of a possum from a Ring camera mounted up high.

The feature is available in the US with the Ring Protect Pro plan. For example, if you want to search for questions about animals, vehicles, packages, and people, it’s possible to look at location, time, and weather. It can also identify various actions, including jumping, running, playing, and riding.

I’ve been playing with Smart Video Search for a few days, and it’s largely worked well. It showed me where my cat had been so I knew where to look for him, it also showed me where the FedEx truck had parked, and it showed me where a possum was in my backyard. Despite receiving several Amazon deliveries, the search found my rabbit’s house when I typed in the name of the truck. It took a while, but I got it through searching for “Amazon delivery person.” I was able to locate them by their blue vest.

I have an indoor / outdoor cat, and I’m always wondering where he is during the day. (I’ve written about how I use security cameras as a digital cat flap.) A few videos were pulled up after typing in the name of the cat. By default, they’re sorted by the most relevant, but I could also choose to sort by date, which puts the most recent activity first. This showed me Smokey had been in the backyard about 10 minutes ago.

Detecting Hard-On-Crime Searches with Artificial Intelligence: Two Years of Life at Amazon in the Light of Amazon Firefights

Hamren’s reign at Ring also has brought a significant shift in the company’s pitch to potential customers. The ads about hard-on-crime disappeared. She pulled back on partnerships with police, which had seen Ring develop tools for users to easily share videos with law enforcement agencies without them having to obtain a warrant.

Our searches for terms some may consider sensitive, including “Black,” “turban,” and “gun,” yielded no results despite there being footage matching those descriptions. People were scooting by in wheelchairs and mothers put strollers on the sidewalk. Ring will now block searches for disabled due to the risk of misuse.

The former option required her to watch a video through Ring’s app to find out who picked the box up and when. In recent weeks, Hamren has allowed Artificial Intelligence to do the searching. She can see the clip of her husband completing his duty once she has typed “package today” into the app.

Liz Hamren, the CEO of Amazon’s Ring camera business, often wonders whether her husband remembered to grab the package of frozen goods that is regularly delivered to their home. If she wanted to, she could check the footage from their Ring.