Searching for Real Things Using the Ring Doorbell Feature: A Conversation with Eric Kuhn, GM, Experiences and Subscriptions

In an ideal world, the Ring app would only notify me when I need to know about something — when my cat is in the backyard or when there’s a raccoon near my chicken coop — to cut down on notification fatigue. But I can see plenty of use for the search function. Beyond the obvious one of looking for specific things after an emergency or incident, I could see myself using it to check whether my son had his tennis bag with him when he left for school, for example.

I opted to use the search feature, and it enabled me to choose which of my Ring cameras I wanted to use. Ring needed my consent to process the videos securely and to use my anonymous searches in order to improve the feature. I could immediately begin searching the app from the menu bar after the app spent a few minutes analyzing my events.

In an interview with The Verge, Kuhn said the feature searches live view and recorded motion events. It only watches video, not audio. When Ring’s 24/7 recording launches next month, it won’t search through all that footage; according to Kuhn, it will be limited to event-triggered recordings and live views. The use of derogatory terms or explicit language is limited by certain guardrails.

Eric Kuhn, GM of Ring experiences and subscriptions explains that Ring is a company that uses Artificial intelligence and visual language modeling to match text to images and quickly deliver results.

There were images on the Ring Doorbell of people wearing red when typing “red sweater front door”. There isn’t a feature offered by competitors which is person recognition. It just sees generic people. Adding the word “red sweater woman” narrowed the results. It also serves up “possibly related” videos when it runs out of relevant matches.

Security cameras can be used to find lost things. I have used the doorbell footage to look for my purse when I left the house or my red sweater when I couldn’t find it. This feature will save me a lot of scrolling time.

The feature can search your entire history up to 180 days, but there are some limitations I get into. I tried searching for possums and raccoons, as I have a lot of late-night backyard visitors. My cat search was more successful than this one. I mostly got to see videos of my cat and dog. But a few blurry images of a possum did show up (from a Ring floodlight camera mounted up high — hence the blur).

The feature is launching today in beta for users in the US with the Ring Protect Pro plan ($19.99 a month). At launch, Ring says it can search for queries related to animals, vehicles, packages, and people, which can be qualified by location, time, and weather — for example, “raccoons in the backyard last night.” It can also identify various actions, including jumping, running, playing, and riding.

I’ve been playing with Smart Video Search for a few days, and it’s largely worked well. It showed me the location of my cat, the time the FedEx truck was at my door, and the fact that there was a person in my backyard. But despite receiving several Amazon deliveries (which my Ring video doorbell alerted me to), the search pulled up my rabbit hutch when I typed in “Amazon truck.” I eventually got it to find the delivery events by searching for “Amazon delivery person,” where it appeared to identify them by their blue vest.

I have an indoor / outdoor cat, and I’m always wondering where he is during the day. I wrote about using security cameras as a digital cat flap. Typing in “cat today” pulled up several videos. They are sorted by the most relevant, but I can choose to sort by date which puts the most recent activity first. The backyard showed that it was about 10 minutes ago.

Searching for Disabled and Black Holes in the Ring App, and how her husband might have picked up the package when she arrived at her home

Hamren’s reign at Ring also has brought a significant shift in the company’s pitch to potential customers. The ads about the tough-on-crime program were no longer shown. Ring developed tools for users to easily share videos with law enforcement agencies without having to obtain a warrant, which led to her pulling back on partnerships with police.

Our searches for terms some may consider sensitive, including “Black,” “turban,” and “gun,” yielded no results despite there being footage matching those descriptions. “Disabled” returned people scooting by in wheelchairs—and mothers pushing strollers. Ring notes it will now block searches for “disabled” due to the risk of misuse.

Traditionally, the latter option required her to laboriously look through Ring’s app to identify if and when the box was picked up. Artificial intelligence has been allowed to do the searching in recent weeks. She can see a video of her husband finishing his duty if she types “package today” into the app.

Liz Hamren questions if her husband remembered to grab the package when it was delivered to their home. She can either control him or check the footage from their Ring.