Ring’s new AI feature makes video history searchable by keyword

Those raccoons are showing up at the back door way more than I knew.

That’s my own takeaway after testing the beta of a new AI-powered “Smart Video Search” feature from Ring, which lets users search the video archive from their doorbells and other Ring cameras using keywords.

The Amazon-owned company announced the feature Wednesday morning. It will be released initially as a public beta, before it’s rolled out as part of a new $19.99/month Ring Home Premium subscription later this year.

Ring is betting that people will find it useful to make practical and fun discoveries, such as when a package was delivered, or who took the last cookie from the jar.

Smart Video Search uses an AI system called Ring IQ, and a vision language model to match text to images. It’s not trained on specific search terms, which means that there’s an endless number of queries to try.

“It’s the next level, the next leap, which takes advantage of a lot of the new AI technology and helps you really cut all the way down to very, very specific things,” said Eric Kuhn, the GM in charge of Ring experiences and subscriptions.

Examples include animals, packages, people, vehicles, and weather, and activities such as running, riding a bike, or playing. It can find a red car, or a blue truck, for example. In my experience, it’s discerning enough to tell the difference between a UPS driver and a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier at the front door.

It distinguishes between daytime and nighttime, and different days of the week.

When a clip is played, it jumps to the specific moment that matches the query.

Ring says there are multiple safeguards incorporated into the feature.

• While it’s possible to search for “person” or “dog,” for example, the feature cannot identify specific people or animals by name or identity.
• Users need to proactively choose to enable the feature first, via the Ring app. It’s possible to activate Smart Video Search for some cameras but not others.
• Ring also says automated moderation technology will prevent people from searching for “offensive, inappropriate, or harmful content.”

Ring CEO Liz Hamren first mentioned plans for the feature in an interview with GeekWire published earlier this year. However, Ring isn’t the first to market with this type of feature. Kirkland, Wash.-based Wyze Labs unveiled its own AI video search feature in August for customers on its $9.99/month Cam Unlimited plan.

As for those early morning visitors at my house, I found that Smart Video Search was even able to differentiate between raccoons, plural, and raccoon, singular — calling up videos showing one or multiple animals depending on which term I used. (This required sorting the results by relevance rather than date.)

Based on my recent experience finding one of those raccoons in my living room, what I’d really want is real-time AI recognition that could trigger an action, such as locking the cat door or activating a flood light to scare them away. You can imagine all sorts of scenarios where this type of automation would be useful.

That’s not possible with Ring’s app, yet, but AI video search is a notable first step.