Ring has announced a new AI-powered Smart Video Search feature It uses text prompts to describe what you are searching for, which can then be matched against Ring camera recordings This saves users the trouble of sorting clips between cameras to find a specific subject, such as a person in a red hoodie or a delivery truck

Smart Video Search will be available in beta starting November 5 for camera owners who subscribe to the $1999 monthly Ring Home Premium subscription

The feature uses Ring's AI technology and Visual Language Modeling with in-house expertise to quickly match text and images After playing with Smart Video Search for the past few days, its accuracy and time-saving results add even more value to my Ring subscription The company makes some of the best security cameras and best video doorbells we've tested, but they don't support local storage, so you have to pay a subscription fee just to store video recordings in the cloud This special offer will help cover the bill Here's how it works during the preview period

After updating the Ring app to the latest version, a search box appeared at the top of the “History” tab Clicking on it allowed me to register individual cameras in the Smart Video Search After 10 minutes of analyzing clips from the past 6 months, I was able to find a match by entering a very specific text descriptor in the search box

In the test, searching for “FedEx truck” and “arccoon in yard at night” instantly found clips of criminals generating motion events Last month, we tested Wyze's rival AI-Fueled Video Search, which struggled with vague searches like “white cat”; Ring's more granular AI search goes further by showing specific time stamps for each clip that matches the prompt

For example, typing “cat walking” would not search for a single cat on the screen; like the timestamp shortcuts in YouTube videos, it took me to the exact moment when multiple cats enter the picture to maximize relevance The “white dog” found my pet accurately, but Wyze's results missed the clip that put the dog front and center earlier in the day

Ring's search system can identify specific things such as “blue shirt,” “bearded man,” and “trash can” Such queries were not a problem for the Ring Smart Video Search, which was also able to find specific types of animals and locations When I typed in “pickup truck in the rain,” my F150 showed up in the front In fact, the only time I did not get results was when I tried to search for a specific type of vehicle

This makes it easier to find people, animals, cars, and luggage in a particular location at a particular time of day, without having to manually look through thumbnails To my surprise, none of the queries were mismatched I would have thought it would confuse a clip of a cat with a clip of a raccoon or dog, but the AI was smart enough to distinguish between the two

Still, there are a few caveats: you must subscribe to Ring's Home subscription plan, which costs $20 per month or $200 per year Besides, Ring's cameras do not have facial recognition capabilities like Arlo, Eufy, and SimpliSafe; Arlo, Eufy, and SimpliSafe have implemented features in their systems to notify you when a particular person or vehicle triggers an event

My biggest complaint is that this new search feature does not work with end-to-end encryption enabled; Ring does not use customer data to train its models, but the added privacy is better to upload everything to the cloud than to local storage Feel better

Overall, Ring's AI search performance is much more reliable, whereas Wyze's is hit or miss From recognizing a “delivery guy with a white package” to requesting a clip of a specific truck (Amazon, FedEx, UPS), the deeper context seems to be fully incorporated