Ring is one of the best-known names in smart home security (it’s been part of Amazon since 2018), with a range of video doorbells and security cameras that send what they see to the Ring app on your phone. A Ring Protect plan feature called Ring Video Descriptions is one of the newest ways Ring helps you make sense of all that footage. With Video Descriptions, you see a text description of the motion activity your Ring doorbells and cameras pick up, which Ring says gives you smart, real-time details on what’s happening. That’s more specific than the usual ‘person seen’ or ‘package seen’ notifications.
AI smarts in Ring’s ecosystem go a lot further than that, though. We’ve already looked at how a Ring Protect plan curates your security feeds, but that’s just scratching the surface. Now, Ring is using what it calls ‘real intelligence’ to work out the context of what your doorbells and cameras see, through four features: those Video Descriptions, Video Search, Unusual Event Alert, and Single Event Alert. Together, Ring says, they help you tell the urgent from the everyday.
That matters more than it might sound. You probably know the drill: your phone buzzes, you see a stack of security camera notifications, open the app to check, and it’s a family member watering the petunias. Or a car pulls up on the street, nothing to do with you. If you have a smart doorbell, a camera on the driveway, and another out the back, you could be getting literally a dozen notifications a day or even more, and most of them aren’t even worth the flick to dismiss.
So Ring’s doorbells and cameras are getting smarter about what they tell you, and when.
All four are Ring Protect plan features, and there are two ways to get them. You can purchase the Pro Intelligence add-on for $5 per camera, per month, on top of your Ring Solo ($4.95 a month) or Ring Multi ($14.95 a month) plan. If you have three or more cameras and want them all to have these features, just go for the Ring Pro plan ($29.95 a month), and no add-on is required. Here’s how they work.
How Ring Video Descriptions tell you what happened
Ring Video Descriptions sit at the heart of it all, because Single Event Alert and Unusual Event Alert both need them turned on.
You’ll get a notification whenever one of your Ring devices detects motion, or someone rings the doorbell. Without Ring Video Descriptions, that notification will be generic. With Video Descriptions, however, the notification is more specific. Instead of ‘person seen’ you’ll get something like ‘a person is walking up the steps with a black dog’ (that’s Ring’s own example).
Ring records activity as ‘motion events’, and each Video Description covers the first few seconds of an event rather than the whole thing. Ring says the reason the description is kept short is so the app can notify you quickly, rather than waiting for the event to end first.
So you get a quick and informative note about the event, and these descriptions are saved in your Event History. This lets you catch up on a day of recordings by reading down a list, rather than opening one video after another to find which ‘person seen’ was the one who knocked over your bins.
Ring’s Video Search works the other way round. If you want to find a clip you’re sure is there (say, the neighbour’s dog got in), you can type in up to 200 characters to do a Video Search. Describe what you’re looking for, and the app goes through your recorded events, and pulls out matching clips. ‘A small brown dog running around the backyard’ should bring up any clips of said dog, from the backyard camera.
The descriptions don’t stop at your phone, either. Connect your Ring devices to an Amazon Echo Show 8 or Echo Show 11 (Amazon’s smart displays, with Alexa built in) and the descriptions are there on screen when you review your Ring events. You can even ask Alexa to keep watch for you. Ring’s example is ‘Alexa, tell me when the pizza is delivered’, and the Echo Show announces it when the pizza turns up. It means you don’t have to keep your phone on you all the time at home.
Unusual Event Alert: flagging what’s out of the ordinary
The first of Ring’s smarter alerts, Unusual Event Alert, cuts down those notification stacks by deciding which events are normal and everyday and which are, well, unusual. It lets the normal events pass without a notification and buzzes you for the out-of-place or unexpected.
Ring says the feature analyses the motion patterns in your recent history, along with the type of activity, and only sends a notification for events that differ from those patterns. It takes some time to learn what normal looks like at your place, and in the meantime your notifications arrive as usual. When an Unusual Event Alert does come through, Event History shows you why it was marked unusual.
The everyday comings and goings, like the family out in the backyard on a Saturday, are routine, so they don’t trigger notifications (though the footage is still recorded, so you can still review and search for it in the app). An unusual event is something like a big gum tree limb coming down in the wind one night, right beside the front door. Your video doorbell sees something it doesn’t usually see, at an hour when normally nothing happens. That’s the kind of thing Unusual Event Alert could flag as out of the ordinary, and having part of a tree on your porch is definitely the kind of thing you want to be alerted about right away.
Single Event Alert: one notification instead of a stack
Single Event Alert also cuts down the number of notifications you get from the Ring app, without losing any awareness of what’s happening around your property.
Picture a typical Aussie weekend. The backyard is in full use by multiple family members. The Ring camera you’ve got set up is angled to cover the gate and the access to the side path, so people are wandering in and out of its view all day. A gardener here. A budding cricketer there. Someone yelling at that dog to go home. And most importantly, these three events cycling over and over for two or three hours. You don’t need a huge stack of notifications on your phone to tell you Johnno goes over to the side fence to retrieve his cricket ball once every eleven minutes, or that you’re putting weeds in the green bin every half an hour.
Single Event Alert, says Ring, combines similar alerts from the same camera, so a run of related events becomes one notification rather than a stack of them.
There is a small trade-off. Ring says to expect a brief delay on these notifications, because the app needs a moment to check whether a new event belongs with something it has already told you about. That’s the whole point, though: the short wait is what saves you from a flood of alerts about the same thing.
Smarter alerts from Ring, and more time back
So you can see how these smart features work to make your Ring doorbell and cameras even more effective at keeping an eye on everything that’s important to you. Ring Video Descriptions, Video Search, Unusual Event Alert, and Single Event Alert combine to give you the gist of what happened at a glance, and fewer notifications about things that you don’t need to worry about. All without reducing the amount of footage the camera captures or limiting how you can review it.
Your Ring doorbell and cameras do the sorting, and you get the time back for the rest of your day.
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