Up to this point, the best home security camera you could buy was the Nest Cam IQ. It’s intelligent enough to recognize faces, and also zoom in and track them across the frame. It’s also $299, which is expensive considering you can get security cameras like the Amazon Cloud Cam for less than half that and it can do almost everything the Nest does. Now Lighthouse AI, a new startup with roots in artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, is throwing its hat in the ring.
The company just launched a smart security camera — named Lighthouse — that costs just as much as the Nest Cam IQ and has similar capabilities: recording 1080p video, 24-hour live streaming, two-way talk and 30 days of storage. Like the Cam IQ, its AI can learn and detect familiar faces, too. What’s different about Lighthouse, is that you can ask it specific questions about the area it surveys. You can ask it “Who came in the house today?” or “What time did Mark leave the house today?”. You’ll also be setup commands, like enabling the camera to message you if somebody isn’t home at a certain time, or if somebody enters the house that it doesn’t recognize. It won’t be as simple to set up these alerts or get these alerts as asking Alexa or Siri; that’s because you’ll have to take out your phone, open the Lighthouse companion app and speak into that so that the app’s natural language processor can figure it all out. But still, it’s pretty cool.
Also, to enable face-recognization and these advanced capabilities, you’ll have to subscribe to a $10/month service. This shouldn’t be a game changer, however, as both Nest and Amazon follow a similar business model for people to get the most out of their home security cameras.
You can buy the Lighthouse security camera today on Amazon.
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