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On Wednesday, SwitchBot released its latest version Outdoor security camera. The smart home company has upped the resolution to 3K and now offers AI video descriptions, which is more of an advantage than most Security companies It was added last year.
The new SwitchBot outdoor tilt camera, which starts at $80, includes motion tracking and object recognition and offers you a choice between wired and wireless connections. It can also Holds up to 512GB of local videos Or offer cloud storage as an option in their subscription plans.
The real highlight is the AI recognition technology, which allows the camera to describe the events it captures. For example, “A man in a UPS uniform walks down the porch carrying a package.” The camera can also provide daily summaries of everything you see, saving you even more time.
I’ve seen these features migrate to cameras from major brands including… bell, nestAnd Blink and Arlo over the past year. They usually come with a hefty subscription fee of around $20, but SwitchBot is less expensive, starting at $5 per month.
Video descriptions are now common in home security, but SwitchBot adds focus on animal species as well.
The only AI identification features you can get for less come from Eufy, which is Plan to offer AI onboarding descriptions for free Later this year.
A SwitchBot representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, SwitchBot has one trick that sets its camera apart: its recognition features are specially trained to recognize wildlife, down to the species level. While most AI cameras can differentiate between dogs, cats, and deer, this SwitchBot camera’s capabilities go a little deeper. This is useful if you want to get notifications like “A coyote enters your garden,” alerting you that the place may not be safe for your outdoor cats or other pets. Discovering the difference between an opossum and a raccoon can help you plan pest management.
The camera also supports Alexa and… Google Homeso you can use Echo Shows and Nest Hubs to view your live stream.
Although SwitchBot’s camera and plans don’t currently include facial recognition, AI technology like this can sometimes be repurposed for other tasks, such as recognizing people, raising surveillance and privacy concerns. I’ve asked SwitchBot if it plans to address these concerns and will update this story when I hear back. In the meantime, I have to find a coyote and convince it to run around my yard for testing purposes.
