Arlo cameras can now recognize pets, vehicles, and packages

Arlo announced today that it’s adding more AI-detection features to its Arlo Smart subscription service for its home security cameras. The company will be rolling out features later this year that will let its Arlo cameras recognize pets, vehicles, and packages.

Arlo Smart uses computer vision technology to alert users of what triggered their camera’s motion sensors to begin recording. It’s a subscription service that starts at $2.99 per month and offers person detection and cloud activity zones, which let users determine specific areas to filter out so the camera isn’t triggered by background activity like trees swaying in the wind. It also sends users rich notifications of what the cameras recorded, which are viewable from the phone’s lock screen.

Arlo

There’s also an Arlo Smart Premier plan that starts at $9.99 per month that adds support for up to 10 Arlo cameras and saves security footage to the cloud for a rolling 30 days. Smart Premier also adds E911 calling capabilities, which lets you call 911 directly from the app to connect you with your home’s nearest dispatchers, no matter where you are.

Arlo claims these are industry-first features, but smart home security company Netatmo’s Presence camera has had object detection for humans, pets, and vehicles since 2016. It also doesn’t charge a subscription fee, but it doesn’t come with Arlo’s E911 calling capabilities.

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Comments

I just wish they’d add the chromecast etc. compatibility to the gen 1 cameras. No one else offers the flexibility of Arlo, but the ability to throw to the TV, have it pop up on a home hub etc. is pulling be to selling them all and going for Nest.

By RikF on 10.25.18 7:18pm

I wish somebody would cover the absolute mess that is Arlo’s software. Check out the Arlo community forums. There are so many bugs in Arlo’s firmware and app that most of the core features are not working correctly. Arlo seems to be intent on cranking out hardware and selling points rather than making their software do what they says it does. They don’t seem to care much about the awful quality of their software.

I say this as an Arlo owner who has spent way too much time attempting to get them to listen to issues. Basic functionality has been partially broken for months. Some of these things include:

  • Cameras go offline and stop recording and notifying completely. They still show as online in the app. They randomly come back after some time. They can be silently failed for hours at a time.
  • Smart notifications are so far delayed as to be useless. It takes 15-120 seconds to get a notification after the camera detects a person. This makes it far too late to be useful and makes any live viewing or alarm features entirely useless.
  • Missing audio from recordings
  • Corrupted video in recordings
  • Recordings never showing up. Get a notification about motion but there is no video clip of it.
  • You still can’t download footage from their paid CVR service. You have to do a screen recording if you want to send it to anybody!
  • The local storage feature does not work reliably. The app will say that everything is fine but if you plug your USB storage device into a computer you will find that Arlo randomly stopped recording at some point and never restarted.
  • Multiple bugs in the app. Geolocation is very unreliable. Schedules break frequently. App crashes randomly. When viewing CVR timeline it will randomly jump back to live view preventing you from viewing some parts of the video. The list goes on.
  • Low frame rate (2-6 FPS) in live view even on fast connections

These are just the issues that I have personally experienced in the last couple of months. The community is full of other severe bugs. Arlo has not made progress on fixing any of these things yet they are releasing new features.

@dami_lee please have a look at the Arlo community and do a story about the awful state of their software. People need to know about it before buying in to Arlo.

https://community.arlo.com/t5/Arlo-Forum-Discussions/ct-p/arlo-forum-discussions

By imagio1 on 10.26.18 3:55pm

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