First look: Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video app is getting a much-needed update

Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service enters the Apple Intelligence party to bring more Descriptive alerts from your connected cameras It allows you to search for snapshots using natural language. The Apple Home app is also getting better AI-powered notifications and finally adds support for energy reporting.

These improvements were announced at WWDC last week and will be available to the public this fall. I’ve been playing with some of the features in the developer beta for iOS 27 and tvOS 27 for a few days, and based on my first impressions, Apple HomeKit Secure Video It’s much improved – enough to put it back in the competition for me as a home security system.

I’ve tested a lot of home security cameras and have pretty much stopped using them Apple HomeKit Secure Video Because it was sometimes unreliable (with cameras disconnecting and missing clips) and sending too many notifications.

Although I like that it processes the video locally and encrypts it end-to-end, the service has been leapfrogged by competitors like Ring and Google Nest thanks to its capabilities. Higher resolution cameras and Smarter alerts powered by AI. This includes text descriptions of recordings, giving you quick information on what’s happening in your home, so you don’t have to wait for a video to appear to watch for yourself – helping reduce notification fatigue. It is a really useful application of AI in smart home.

With Apple Intelligence bringing these features to Apple Home, Apple’s smart home platform gains parity with competitors’ offerings. It will also soon support video resolutions of up to 4K, and when you take into account that the service works with cameras from multiple manufacturers, it becomes even more convincing – as long as you’re an iPhone user.

Text descriptions powered by Apple intelligence

To activate the new Apple Intelligence features, I needed to download iOS 27 developer beta on my iPhone 17 Pro Max and tvOS 27 beta on my Apple TV 4K, which acts as a home hub. Then I have a new Apple Intelligence section in Home Settings. Here, I toggled the new options for “Summarize Videos” and “Reduce Notifications” and selected which cameras receive the summaries.

Summary Videos uses AI to process video from my HomeKit Secure Video cameras and send a notification with a more detailed description of the action. So, instead of an alert that said “Animal Detected,” I was getting “Dog in Yard,” and instead of “Person Detected,” I saw “Lawn Mowing.” I also received one notification summarizing multiple activities from one camera: “Someone entered the yard and then back to a dog. Aqara G5 changed modes.”

In the app, each clip now also displays this short, AI-generated description, such as “Someone holding a cat in the kitchen” or “Chickens grazing in the yard.” Sometimes it identifies the person (I have facial recognition), but not always.

The descriptions are pretty brief, especially compared to the ones I get from Ring and Google’s AI features, but they provide useful additional context. I also still get standard alerts, like an animal or person detected, so my notification load hasn’t decreased. However, this is the first developer beta, so I expect to see more improvements before launch.

Searching natural language camera feeds worked well – I typed “show me my cat” and got a lot of cat videos. But she couldn’t tell the difference between my gray cat and my black cat. If I’m using a HomeKit video doorbell, it’ll be useful for looking up things like what time my son arrives home or what time the UPS delivery person arrives.

I haven’t seen any discount notices for other home accessories yet. According to Apple, this will use Apple Intelligence to determine that multiple activities from connected devices, such as someone arriving home and opening a door, are associated with the same event and send a single notification that it will continue to update.

Of course, I ran into a lot of bugs, and the app crashed fairly regularly, but again – the first beta for the developers. Overall, this seems like a really good start, and Apple Intelligence has already improved the utility of HomeKit-connected cameras.

Improved interface and faster response times

One HomeKit Secure Video improvement I noticed right away is that viewing recorded clips and live streams loads faster. I can also watch more than a couple of live streams when I’m away from home, which is a welcome upgrade and, again, something competitors have had for a while.

I’m a big fan of the new camera view in the Home app, where I can scroll through a timeline of clips or view the live feed from all the cameras at once. Clips are sequenced by time, not by camera, so scrolling shows activity around the house in real time. When I click on a clip, the camera switcher displays footage from other cameras recorded at the same time on both sides – which is really useful. I’ve used a lot of camera app interfaces, and this is one of the simplest and most intuitive.

Apple has also said that Apple Intelligence will be able to understand connected activity across cameras and present footage from different cameras in a single clip in the app, but I haven’t seen this yet in my testing.

Other improvements include an overhaul of the HomeKit Secure Video infrastructure, including how clips are captured, stored, and processed. As mentioned earlier, I noticed that the cameras loaded faster, and were also more stable. The Eve outdoor camera, which was regularly disconnected from the Internet, has remained online since the upgrade. Whether these improvements have been addressed Missing section issue It will take more tests.

Apple also announced support for 2K and 4K HomeKit Secure video streaming, but this feature is not available in the current beta. It appears that it will rely on compatible camera manufacturers – including Aqara, Eve and Eufy – to implement the new HomeKit Secure Video Specifications It was announced at WWDC, which means it may be a while until we see it in our homes.

Energy monitoring finally arrives

Another long-awaited upgrade is that the Home app now supports Energy monitoring Through the article. There’s a new power icon in the Power tab, as well as tiles for each connected device to monitor power. I have Article above the topic Ikea Grillplates Components It now shows its current, average and daily usage in kWh. Tapping on the card took me to more detailed reports, where I could see its usage over a year, six months, a month, a week, and a day.

However, there’s no option to use power reports to trigger automations, and you still can’t use various events captured by the cameras to trigger automations, such as “Turn on porch light if packet is detected.” This is something you can do in Google Home, and this platform has added the ability for that Create automations based on custom actions.

Smarter cameras and energy reporting are great additions to Apple Home, and the HomeKit Secure Video upgrades have impressed me so far; I look forward to seeing how they shape up in the full release later this year. But Apple is still playing catch-up when it comes to features like automation and intelligence. These are what transform a smart home platform from a command and control system into something that can proactively manage itself.

Screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Toohey/The Verge