Ring adds AI-led smart video search in Australia and New Zealand

If you’re subscribed to Ring’s premium tier for any of its products, you’ll be able to do natural language searches for specific stored video clips from your doorbells, cameras and more.

Ring’s latest product offering in the Australian and New Zealand market is what it’s calling “Smart Video Search”, using a large language AI model to allow its customers to search for specific situations within their recorded video feed without having to scroll through timelines or try to remember roughly when an event might have happened in front of their Ring Doorbell or other Ring Camera.

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Smart Video Search isn’t an entirely new service – it’s been available in Ring’s home USA market since October last year – but it’s still noted as being in “beta” form.

The service itself works with both typed and spoken queries via the Ring app, but it won’t kick in unless you’re subscribed to Ring’s highest tier plan in Australia and New Zealand, known as Ring Home Premium.

If you’re on the Ring Home Basic or Ring Home Standard tiers, Smart Video Search won’t be available to you.

Ring Home Premium brings with it a host of features including 24/7 recording and up to 180 days of video event history, and from today in Australia and New Zealand, you’d be able to search those 180 days of history for the name on the shirt of the pizza delivery guy (it’s probably not Dougie any more, right?), or for if your package delivery guy actually placed your box at your front door, or just punted it into your front yard.

Though if that’s an Amazon delivery, given Ring is 100% owned by Amazon, that could be all kinds of awkward…

Ring Smart Video Search: Alex’s Take

AI is of course the “hot” technology label to throw onto any tech gadget right now, so I’m naturally wary, though Ring Smart Video Search is an interesting implementation.

For those already subscribing at the top tier it doesn’t add any cost while adding a potentially useful search feature that might be able to uncover if your neighbour really has been tipping over your wheelie bins under the cover of darkness quickly (they really ought to stop), or just fun things around your property whether that’s wildlife, kids playing or any other detail they pick up on.

The demonstrations I’ve seen do seem to relate to real world needs for this kind of quick discovery, and that’s a plus.

On the minus side, Ring Smart Video Search is only available in English, and of course it’s tied behind that pricier subscription tier.

It also raises an interesting question around privacy in the digital age and what it means to train up these kinds of models with data as you go.

Not subscribing would be the simplest way to “opt out” of this, and I’m told you can also tell the Ring app not to index specific cameras in that way, so if you had an indoor Ring camera for example you might want to exclude that. However in more public facing spaces it does raise the issue of people being spotted walking past and what that means for their privacy.

Finally, and this is super pedantic, but still… am I the only one who misses the days when software being in “beta” form meant that it wasn’t actually ready for public usage and still needed to be worked on?