A security camera is there primarily to watch over your home, but an Arlo camera should soon be able to tell you a little more about what’s happening.
Outside of the baby camera by the formerly Netgear-named Arlo, most of its security cameras are designed to do one thing: watch over a section of your home to make sure undesireables aren’t doing something undesireable.
That could be the front or the back, but usually it’s positioned so it can watch something, like when a person comes onto your property so you have video of them doing it, or at the very least, an alert.
Those alerts are typically all the same, and involve you finding out that something has tripped the security, and motion has been detected, often getting you to grab your phone and find out what that “motion” was. But pretty soon, you might get a notification that is more than mere motion.
This week, Arlo has announced that it is rolling out features to its cameras courtesy of a new subscription service that uses artificial intelligence in the cloud to work out what things are, meaning “motion” can be something else.
That essentially means algorithms will work with what the cameras see, working out whether the very thing that triggered Arlo’s security cameras is something more interesting, such as a dog running by the camera, a car driving onto the property, or a package left by the door.
The features will be rolled out to a specific plan called Arlo Smart, but the rub here is that Arlo Smart isn’t yet available in Australia.
In fact, Arlo Smart and its new features aren’t available outside of America at the moment, meaning these features won’t be rolling out to Australian Arlo camera owners just yet.
Our guess is that because Arlo Smart hooks into a service to let you potentially call the police, it may not be configured for places that don’t call “911” to reach emergency services, though there’s probably a little more to it. Arlo Smart also does cost extra, so when it does launch here, expect it to cost a monthly access fee in order to get those extra features.
Hopefully we’ll all see those features soon, though, as it would help to make what is a solid camera system just that little bit smarter, and would mean diving for the phone to check motion notifications could actually mean something tangible, too.
