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CNET
20-05-2025
- CNET
Gemini and Other AI are Searching Our Security Videos: Here's What You Should Know
Google's Gemini AI has unleashed a new era for home security, one where algorithms search through our uploaded videos, label them and use that data to answer complex questions. Other AI from Arlo, Amazon Alexa, Siri and many more companies are also adding these search functions for our home security cameras and similar devices. That's useful, but it does come with some caveats. When we asked Tete Xiao, CEO and co-founder of startup Prompt AI, about how these features can be used, he replied, "Home AI could enable language-based notifications and conversations about what's happening at home in real-time. You can get insights such as which delivery service came by, whether the dog was fed and if suspicious activity was detected around your house. You could even ask what your kids did after school or if specific people it recognizes stopped by." As our CNET survey confirmed, people have worries about AI and privacy, and new features like these are bound to raise questions. Let's go over everything you should know about this new technology. Read more: I Thought I'd Hate AI in Home Security. I Couldn't Have Been More Wrong What's special about an AI video search? Ring has a video search option next to its camera view. Ring Home security cameras are triggered by motion detection and object recognition. While there are ways to cut down on the triggers and associated alerts you get, cameras still tend to pick up lots of action, especially in a busy home. That adds up to a lot of footage to look through. Most of this footage isn't very important -- until it suddenly is. If you want to find the details or where a pet ran off to, why an expected package disappeared or another key event, you may have to sift through a day of triggered motion recordings (or longer, depending on the scenario). That's a headache. AI video searches have come to security cameras to make it easier. These allow you to type in a quick question or use a voice assistant to ask about specific objects and people. The search function will then scan all related video recordings and summarize them in a text answer so you can get the details you need. It's a bit like how AI can summarize long text chains for you, but applied to videos. So where does the "AI" part of the search come in? AI searches are being powered by Gemini and other platforms. Photo Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images This new wave of AI technology refers to machine learning algorithms like LLMs (large language models) that are capable of assimilating a ton of human "language" and replicating it. Those languages include not only what we speak or type (think ChatGPT), but the way we identify objects in paintings, use logic to figure out problems and share ideas via mathematics or coding. So these kinds of home searches have been trained to identify all kinds of common objects found in security videos, then put that identification together into a cohesive explanation that makes sense to humans. Combine that with their ability to understand even casual questions and you can get a specific answer without hunting through video yourself -- at least, when everything works right. How am I supposed to use a feature like that? Gemini can answer questions from your video history, too. Tyler Lacoma/CNET It may seem like a strange use of AI at first, but we do run into home and family situations where it can be useful. One of Google's examples is asking "Did the kids leave their bikes in the driveway again?" with Gemini reporting back that the kids had left their bikes in the driveway several times this week. Of course, this kind of snitching works with all kinds of toys or belongings from pets or children. Homeowners may also want answers to questions like, "Did a UPS truck stop by today?" "Where did the cat go?" "Where did I leave the keys" or "Did the dog jump up on the sofa today?" Others may want the details about, "Every visitor who opened the door today," or info on "a red car that stopped by on March 3," and so on. Many of these AIs also have the ability to give broad summaries of what happened, security-wise, during the day or weekend. Add face recognition technology and they may be able to answer questions about certain people, like, "Did Aunt Marge come knocking today?" What brands are offering this kind of video search? We've seen these kinds of AI searches offered by Google Home in combo with its Gemini AI, as well as Ring (currently in beta), Wyze and a number of third-party AI platforms with more on the way. Most recently, Amazon has announced Alexa Plus that includes a similar search analysis (free for Prime users, $20 for others). While Arlo doesn't have AI searches, it is working on particularly advanced, customizable object detection. Even pet cams like Furbo's subscription cam are using AI to understand and report on what pets are doing. Eventually, we expect AI searches to arrive at nearly every security brand that offers video storage. Do I need a special kind of camera to use this type of AI video search? Not usually. These features aren't really housed in cameras, so any newer security camera that works with the brand's app should benefit from these AI searches. Some brands may list specific exceptions: Ring, for example, warns its search won't work with cams like the Ring Edge or Ring Alarm Pro. However, with searches like these it's a good idea to have a series of cameras around or inside your home, so they can analyze and track things from multiple angles to provide more complete explanations. Do I have to pay for an AI video search? Cams like Arlo's cam capture a lot of footage in day, especially if they're outdoors. Arlo You probably won't have to pay any extra fees specifically for an AI search add-on. However, this AI functionality is typically bundled into higher-tier security subscription services and often requires cloud video storage. If you aren't paying for a subscription right now, you will likely need a subscription (and its monthly fee) like Nest Aware or Ring Home Premium to enable AI searches. Alexa Plus is a slight exception, since you do have to pay an Amazon Prime subscription to access it, but it's also available on its own for $20 per month. Is this type of video searching accurate? In our testing it has performed adequately so far. Modern AIs do have their struggles with hallucinations and misinformation, but they seem to do better with relatively straight object recognition and explanations about what it has seen in video. It doesn't always get all the details right or tell every bit of important info, but it works to track objects and answer basic questions about what it has seen. Of course, like all LLMs there's lot of potential for improvement as video AI search training is refined. That brings us to another important point… What if I don't want AI looking through all my security videos? Brands like Ring will require subscriptions for advanced features. Ring It's normal to have some privacy questions about AI, and this field is so new in home security that we're still learning about the risks ourselves. AIs generally want lots of information to train on, and using AI features in home cams typically gives the company permission to use your video footage for AI training. Since the footage analyzed is generally kept in the cloud, it may also be more vulnerable to security flaws and employee abuse as well. However, there are usually ways to turn AI assistants like Gemini off entirely or to avoid participating in the video AI search. You do not have to use these search features, but the companies offering them will be looking for ways to analyze your video footage any way they can. We do have options for video cameras without subscriptions if this all makes you nervous. Some companies are more focused on privacy than others. Tete Xiao of Prompt AI noted that, with its home security platforms, "We never train on user data without explicit permission, and even then, we do not use personal details—period. We also give users the ability to permanently delete their data from our platform at any time" Look for signs like these if you're concerned about privacy. If you want to learn even more, check out our guide on if the police can seize your home security footage and the absolute worst spots to put security cameras.
Associated Press
25-02-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
MEET SEEMOUR™, YOUR SMART HOME'S EVOLUTION TO INTELLIGENCE
Prompt AI Releases The World's First Home AI With Visual Intelligence SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Prompt AI, a pioneering visual intelligence research and technology company founded by leading scientists and pioneers of computer vision, today announced the availability of Seemour, the world's first visual intelligence platform. Seemour can understand, describe, and act on what it sees in real time when connected to a home camera. Seemour can summarize moments or hours of video footage, learn the names of family, friends, and pets, and even inform you which delivery service is at your door. Seemour is like if your home could talk, helping you feel safer and more connected to what's happening around you. Experience how Seemour can transform your home through visual intelligence. Download Seemour today for free from the App Store or visit for more information. Seemour's visual intelligence can reduce unnecessary camera notifications by as much as 70 percent. It harnesses the power of large vision-language models and machine learning to summarize multiple on-camera events into a single, easy-to-understand update. This intelligence also allows Seemour to review hours of footage and understand what's happening. In an upcoming update, users will soon be able to ask Seemour questions, saving time and gaining insight. 'Imagine a future where you can ask your home what happened today or inform your roommate that you've stepped out to go to the grocery store when they open the fridge,' said Tete Xiao, chief executive officer and co-founder of Prompt AI. 'That future is closer than you think, and we're excited to bring it to you.' Key features include: Intelligent Video Summaries. Get easy-to-read summaries of significant events captured by your cameras, saving you time and hassle, and never miss a moment. Personalized Notifications. Seemour learns and remembers familiar people, allowing you to label them for more personalized notifications. Specific Pet Notifications. Teach Seemour the names of all your dogs and/or cats, and Seemour can tell you which pet got into the trash. 70% Fewer Alerts. Stay informed without overload. Receive notifications only for the moments that matter, from familiar people and pets to potential intrusions. Suspicious Behavior Alerts. Seemour can instantly alert you if it sees unusual or suspicious activity, making your home safer and more secure. Delivery Service Announcements. Get instant notifications for who's at your door, whether it's FedEx, Amazon, or the mailman. Wildlife Detection. Capture and enjoy the beauty of nature with alerts for wildlife like birds, deer, or bears spotted on your property—helping you stay aware and connected to the world outside. Seamless Integration. See your camera feeds in one platform, with more integrations coming soon. Ask Seemour (coming soon). No need to review hours of footage just to know when something happened. Save time and gain insights by asking Seemour questions like, 'Where did I leave my keys?' or, 'When did my daughter leave home today?' Seemour reviews your camera footage, offering answers and highlights using naturally spoken language. Invisibility (coming soon). Seemour can remove individuals from video footage to protect their privacy. Custom Visual Alerts (coming soon). Get alerts when Seemour sees specific things like Fido digging in your backyard, even if it's never seen that before. Download Seemour for free today in the App Store to make your smart home smarter. Visit to learn more about our groundbreaking technology. About Prompt AI Prompt AI is a pioneering visual intelligence research and technology company based in San Francisco that aims to create human-centered, innovative, and useful products for everyone. It is co-founded by Tete Xiao and Seth Park, both of whom hold in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and Trevor Darrell, a founder and co-leader of Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab, renowned for his significant contributions to the advancement of computer vision and AI research. Under their leadership, the company has raised $6M in seed led by prominent investors AIX Ventures and Abstract Ventures, with participation from several renowned angel investors. Learn more at
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
This AI Startup Promises to Erase People From Home Security Videos -- And Much More
You can find AI nearly everywhere today, and home security cameras are no exception thanks to the extensive AI video searches now offered by Google Gemini, Ring and many other brands. But startup Prompt AI and its Seemour platform (announced today) promise to go several steps further, into AI features I've never seen on a security cam before. Seemour's third-party AI focuses on visual intelligence, with training on things like objects and movement that allows it to analyze everything your home security cams are seeing. Most home security cameras can do this -- Arlo, for example, now allows you to label custom objects for AI identification -- but Seemour goes a step beyond. In addition to video summaries and personalized notifications about what it sees, Seemour touts a collection of much more unique tricks, notably the ability to learn your pets by name for more accurate notifications and the "coming soon" ability to recognize specific individuals and remove them from video footage, increasing their privacy around the home. Seemour's full promised list also includes other AI responses I haven't seen in home security systems before, such as specific notifications about wildlife, the ability to recognize and report a delivery (as opposed to just a package) and the ability to watch for suspicious human movement (a feature usually focused on commercial cams). Prompt AI also plans on giving the platform the ability to ask Seemour questions the same way Google Gemini currently operates, like, "Where did I put my keys?" And it's planning on incorporating specific activity alerts like a dog starting to dig a hole, something we've seen pet companies like Furbo experiment with as well. "Imagine a future where you can ask your home what happened today or inform your roommate that you've stepped out to go to the grocery store when they open the fridge," said Tete Xiao, chief executive officer and co-founder of Prompt AI. "That future is closer than you think, and we're excited to bring it to you." The Seemour app is currently available on the Apple Store (don't confuse it for a very different service) but hasn't yet come to Android. We'll make time to experiment with it ourselves and see how good the AI training is, but you can test it out yourself, too…with one caveat. It's difficult enough to trust a well-established security brand like Nest or Ring to analyze your video with AI, let alone a startup. Using Seemour is going to take some trust on your part as Prompt AI doesn't have much of a security track record yet and will need plenty of information on you and your pets, as well as access to your video feeds. It's also harder to ask consumer to adopt a third-party app for their videos than simply rely on what the security cam brand has already included, which is why I expect Seemour is probably aiming for eventual built-in integrations as well. That said, Seemour has an impressive list of potential capabilities, features I fully expect to come to other home security AIs in one form or another in the coming years. For now, Seemour seems to be first out of the gate for several of them, and I'll be keeping an eye on the service.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Yahoo
How AI Has Started Sorting Through Your Home Security Videos
A new tech feature is on the rise in home security video and it's all about the latest AI capabilities. These AI tricks could make some users uncomfortable, while greatly improving the experience for others. The new feature is intelligent video searching, or the ability for advanced AIs like Gemini, Apple Intelligence and others to review recorded home security footage, analyze it and then explain it when users have specific questions. What does that mean if you have a security camera? A lot -- when used correctly. When we asked Tete Xiao, CEO and co-founder of startup Prompt AI, about how these features can be used, he replied, "Home AI could enable language-based notifications and conversations about what's happening at home in real-time. You can get insights such as which delivery service came by, whether the dog was fed and if suspicious activity was detected around your house. You could even ask what your kids did after school or if specific people it recognizes stopped by." Let's go over everything you should know about this new technology. Read more: I Thought I'd Hate AI in Home Security. I Couldn't Have Been More Wrong Home security cameras are triggered by motion detection and object recognition. While there are ways to cut down on the triggers and associated alerts you get, cameras still tend to pick up lots of action, especially in a busy home. That adds up to a lot of footage to look through. Most of this footage isn't very important -- until it suddenly is. If you want to find the details or where a pet ran off to, why an expected package disappeared or another key event, you may have to sift through a day of triggered motion recordings (or longer, depending on the scenario). That's a headache. AI video searches have come to security cameras to make it easier. These allow you to type in a quick question or use a voice assistant to ask about specific objects and people. The search function will then scan all related video recordings and summarize them in a text answer so you can get the details you need. It's a bit like how AI can summarize long text chains for you, but applied to videos. This new wave of AI technology refers to machine learning algorithms like LLMs (large language models) that are capable of assimilating a ton of human "language" and replicating it. Those languages include not only what we speak or type (think ChatGPT), but the way we identify objects in paintings, use logic to figure out problems and share ideas via mathematics or coding. So these kinds of home searches have been trained to identify all kinds of common objects found in security videos, then put that identification together into a cohesive explanation that makes sense to humans. Combine that with their ability to understand even casual questions and you can get a specific answer without hunting through video yourself -- at least, when everything works right. It may seem like a strange use of AI at first, but we do run into home and family situations where it can be useful. One of Google's examples is asking "Did the kids leave their bikes in the driveway again?" with Gemini reporting back that the kids had left their bikes in the driveway several times this week. Of course, this kind of snitching works with all kinds of toys or belongings from pets or children. Homeowners may also want answers to questions like, "Did a UPS truck stop by today?" "Where did the cat go?" "Where did I leave the keys" or "Did the dog jump up on the sofa today?" Others may want the details about, "Every visitor who opened the door today," or info on "a red car that stopped by on March 3," and so on. Many of these AIs also have the ability to give broad summaries of what happened, security-wise, during the day or weekend. Add face recognition technology and they may be able to answer questions about certain people, like, "Did Aunt Marge come knocking today?" We've seen these kinds of AI searches offered by Google Home in combo with its Gemini AI, as well as Ring (currently in beta), Wyze and a number of third-party AI platforms with more on the way. There are signs Amazon's Alexa is starting to enter a similar era. While Arlo doesn't have AI searches, it is working on particularly advanced, customizable object detection. Even pet cams like Furbo's subscription cam are using AI to understand and report on what pets are doing. Eventually, we expect AI searches to arrive at nearly every security brand that offers video storage. Not usually. These features aren't really housed in cameras, so any newer security camera that works with the brand's app should benefit from these AI searches. Some brands may list specific exceptions: Ring, for example, warns its search won't work with cams like the Ring Edge or Ring Alarm Pro. However, with searches like these it's a good idea to have a series of cameras around or inside your home, so they can analyze and track things from multiple angles to provide more complete explanations. You probably won't have to pay any extra fees specifically for an AI search add-on. However, this AI functionality is typically bundled into higher-tier security subscription services and often requires cloud video storage. If you aren't paying for a subscription right now, you will likely need a subscription (and its monthly fee) like Nest Aware or Ring Home Premium to enable AI searches. In our testing it has performed adequately so far. Modern AIs do have their struggles with hallucinations and misinformation, but they seem to do better with relatively straight object recognition and explanations about what it has seen in video. It doesn't always get all the details right or tell every bit of important info, but it works to track objects and answer basic questions about what it has seen. Of course, like all LLMs there's lot of potential for improvement as video AI search training is refined. That brings us to another important point… It's normal to have some privacy questions about AI, and this field is so new in home security that we're still learning about the risks ourselves. AIs generally want lots of information to train on, and using AI features in home cams typically gives the company permission to use your video footage for AI training. Since the footage analyzed is generally kept in the cloud, it may also be more vulnerable to security flaws and employee abuse as well. However, there are usually ways to turn AI assistants like Gemini off entirely or to avoid participating in the video AI search. You do not have to use these search features, but the companies offering them will be looking for ways to analyze your video footage any way they can. We do have options for video cameras without subscriptions if this all makes you nervous. Some companies are more focused on privacy than others. Tete Xiao of Prompt AI noted that, with its home security platforms, "We never train on user data without explicit permission, and even then, we do not use personal details—period. We also give users the ability to permanently delete their data from our platform at any time" Look for signs like these if you're concerned about privacy. If you want to learn even more, check out our guide on if the police can seize your home security footage and the absolute worst spots to put security cameras.
