Amazon’s new Ring camera is actually a flying drone

Ring on Thursday introduced a new product in its growing lineup of smart home devices – the Ring Always Home Cam. Unlike other home security cameras from the Amazon company, Always Home Cam is a flying camera drone that is not in use when it docks. The Ring Always Home Cam will be available in 2021 and will cost $ 250.

Amazon’s new Ring camera

With this hardware announcement, Ring says you’ll be able to turn on end-to-end encryption in the Ring App’s Control Center “later this year” in an effort to improve the security of your device.

A bit of ring history

Ring before Ring, it was a startup called Bot Home Automation. Inaugural Product of Bot Home, 2014 DoorbotWas among the first Video doors in the market. However, there were a lot of problems – clunky design, limited features and poor performance. Then the bot reached the home ring, was Bought by amazon And now sells a growing variety of smart home security and automation devices and related accessories.

Ring has been in discussions with law enforcement agencies for its Neighbor Program partnership, which allows Ring customers to share their saved video clips. Privacy advocates express concern over how Ring and law enforcement agencies Collect and use information they gather. Also has a ring Patent for facial recognition technology Which will scan through a law enforcement database.

Security has also been a big topic of conversation User data being revealed in December 2018. It inspired the ring Two-factor authentication is required and add a privacy and security control center to the app Where customers can find and change their personal account settings more easily.

Always home cam and end-to-end encryption

Ring says Always Home Cam travels on a defined path that you designate – it cannot be manually controlled – and you can see the feed live in the Ring app. Ring president Leila Ruhi told me, “The path is completely determined by the customer … You actually drive the device around your house and train on that path and part ways to camera Can fly from there. ” Phone.

It has HD live streaming and a runtime of 5 minutes, and takes about an hour to charge. Ruhi said that to make it a “purpose-driven security camera”, the short runtime was deliberate.

Can work with Ring alarm security kit, So that activity is detected if your security system is set to distant mode, Always Home Cam should fly around to leave its dock and watch.

As far as privacy goes, Always Home Cam’s camera is hidden when docked and should only start recording when it leaves the dock and flies around your house. It is designed for humming so that you know when it is flying and recording. The camera is also equipped with an “obstacle avoidance technique”, so it should avoid things coming in its way. If it feels an obstacle in its normal path path, the camera will return to its dock and send you an alert, letting you know that it cannot complete its pass around your home.

Ring has also added a video encryption page to the privacy and security landing page of its control center. After end-to-end encryption becomes available later this year, customers should be able to turn on the feature for each individual compatible device. Ring will provide a list of compatible devices later this year.