Amazon Ring doorbell is one of the most used smart home accessories that can keep up with modern surveillance technology. Well, there's a new premium subscription coming to town and it is said to have advanced AI search on top of 24/7 recording functionality.
While these improvements sound good on paper, are they good enough for their price?
What Does Ring Home Premium Offer to Customers?
Ring Home Premium will be the new tier, rolling out on November 5, according to a new report by TechCrunch. According to the new plan, it will cost around $19.99 a month and feature several premium features, starting with 24/7 recording, advanced AI-powered video search, and more. As part of a broad redesign of its subscription plans, Ring also renames existing options and readjusts them.
There are the following new renewal subscription options:
- Ring Home Basic: This is simply the ring-protect basic, and now it still goes at $4.99 a month.
- Ring Home Standard: This is the Ring Protect Plus, which costs $9.99 monthly. It presents more features than a simple plan but 24/7 recording and AI search are not allowed.
- Ring Home Premium: The priciest plan at $19.99 per month comes with features like continuous recording, AI search, more monitoring services, and some of Astro's features from Amazon's home robot.
What Ring Protect Pro Subscribers Need to Know
For subscribers already subscribing to Ring Protect Pro, some changes are in store. The subscribers will lose access to a number of important features unless they opt to upgrade their subscription to Ring Home Premium.
Starting next month, users with Ring Protect Pro will be losing all of the following:
- The local video storage
- Internet backup
- Amazon's Eero Secure suite
The SOS emergency response feature is available for subscribers who are not using Ring Alarm or Ring Alarm Pro
All of these, and more besides, will only be available on the new premium level. Users electing to stay on their existing plans will lose access to most of these and many other security elements that have been included with a subscription in the past.
AI Video Search is Questionable Based on Recent Test
AI-powered video search is probably the single most noticed feature of Ring Home Premium, a new tier of the company's video doorbell service. At its heart is keyword search: Look for "backpack" or "speeding car," for example, and Ring will trawl recorded footage for clips that contain those words. The results of early tests have been mixed, Wired tells us.
For example, on some of their test queries, the AI performed surprisingly well: for object classes, it recognized objects like backpacks and scarves, while for activity classes, it managed to identify speeding cars or rollerblading. Yet the AI made errors at the same rate—for example, recognizing car headlights as fireworks or people with blonde hair as golden retrievers. Even the sensitive words like "Black" and "gun" produced no results.
Amazon has acknowledged that the AI search is still a work in progress and promises that this feature will be more fully realized with time as it accumulates more data and refines its algorithms.
Whether one will end up paying the extra couple of dollars each month for Ring Home Premium strictly depends on what consumers are willing to pay for the extra functionalities.
For some, the security of knowing continuous recording and AI search is something worth the money from the premium; to others, it may be something to remain in a more affordable plan.
