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.