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Nest Cams have learned what doors are

Nest Cams have learned what doors are

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Nest Cam door recognition
Nest

Nest is slowly adding object recognition features to its security cameras, and today it’s introducing another: the ability to identify doors.

Cameras hooked up to Nest’s cloud service will now be able to recognize doors and send custom alerts for activity around them. The feature doesn’t necessarily let the Nest Cam do any more than it currently can, but it should make notifications a bit more descriptive.

To get the new feature, Nest Cam owners will have subscribe to Nest’s cloud service, Nest Aware, which costs $100 per year for a single camera and $50 per year for each additional camera.

Cloud features could eventually make Nest Cams much smarter

The service also lets Nest cameras identify when people come into view, which sounds a bit more useful. That feature was added last July.

Door identification is a pretty small expansion of Nest’s cloud features. Though it takes advantage of what are certainly some complicated algorithms, it ultimately just draws a box around where your door is to create an “activity zone” for custom alerts — something that Nest Cams already allow you to do.

Nest Cam door recognition
Nest

The difference now is that you don’t have to identify doors manually (by going into the app and drawing a box around each door your camera can see) and can just leave it up to Nest. That’ll probably help people who subscribe to the service but don’t know about the activity zone feature.

This alone won’t make Nest Aware that much more attractive of an offering. But as Nest continues to add computer vision features like this, making Nest Cam’s alerts that much smarter, it’s easy to imagine how the service could become a must-have. It’s just still a ways away.