Nest wants to show you the door. No, we don’t mean that it’s attempting to kick you out of your house, but rather that it wants to help you better monitor what’s going on within your home thanks to some new machine learning smarts. In an update to its security cameras and the companion Aware app, Nest has added automatic door detection and animated push notifications for premium customers.
With these new features, the Nest will learn what doors look like, and mark them as “Activity Zones” that are correlated with specific notifications. That means that you’ll be able to receive alerts that read “There was motion at your front door,” instead of “There was motion in your hallway.” While zones themselves are nothing new, you actually haven’t been able to set them up for doors before — not easily, at least. Nest Aware subscribers previously were forced to manually denote a door, but now, Nest is doing it for you using pattern recognition, sensors, and deep learning algorithms.
Both the iOS 10 and Android 7 versions of Aware will also now give you animated preview notifications when your camera detects motion. This is an upgrade from the thumbnail stills that were previously delivered to users. Also, if your Nest Protect alarm detects smoke, you’ll be able to see video from all your installed Nest Cams on your phone, so you can monitor a dangerous situation in real time.
If this additional line of security sounds like something you want to invest in, you can subscribe to Nest Aware for $10 a month or $100 per year, which will get you 10 days of continuous cloud storage of any video footage. Or, you can pay $30 a month or $300 a year if you’d prefer to have 30 days of storage, which is perhaps better for folks who spend longer periods of time away from home.
Few things ruin a quiet evening faster than a robot vacuum roaring through the living room. Most of us end up pausing the cleaning run, which defeats the whole purpose of owning one. Matic thinks it has the answer with its new Serene robot vacuum, and the big selling point is how little noise it makes.
The Matic Serene runs at 52 decibels even when cleaning at full power. To put that in perspective, Matic compares it to the hum of your refrigerator. It is available now for $1,695, which is $200 more than the original Matic’s current price.
Outdoor security cameras are not always practical if you live in an apartment or rental. Drilling into an exterior wall may be off-limits, while pointing a regular indoor camera through a window can create another problem once reflections start showing up after dark.
Baseus is trying to solve both issues with the new PrimeSentinel W1, a $69.99 security camera designed specifically to monitor the outdoors through glass. It mounts directly to a window without drilling and uses a 4K Starlight sensor with an F1.0 aperture for full-color monitoring during the day and at night.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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