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Ring made its name with its smart doorbells with built-in cameras, and now sells more indoor cameras than any other company, capturing more than 40% of the market. When you've already moved tens of millions of devices (enough to raise serious concerns about their use as part of the surveillance state), you always need to keep innovating, and today, the company announced a product it has been working on for a decade: an indoor camera drone powered by artificial intelligence. I got a chance to check it out during a media event yesterday, and I can report that, as harbingers of our dystopian future go, it is only mildly terrifying.
The drone camera is one of two products in the company's new Ring Robotics line, alongside a "rover cam" that looks kind of like the canister of a vacuum cleaner attached to an iPad. While the Ring Rover Cam is priced at $999.99 and targeted at businesses, the Ring Drone Cam is a much more affordable $249.99, reasonable enough that it will appeal to consumers looking for another way to keep (robot) eyes on their stuff.
The drone camera records 2K video and has a 148-degree field of view and the ability to rotate 360 degrees. It works with existing Ring cameras, doorbells, sensors, and alarms, as well as the Alexa Home Map. It has a flight time of eight minutes, and once it returns to its base station, it takes around an hour to fully recharge (eight minutes on the dock will give it one minute in the air).
The Ring Drone Camera relies on AI
As Ring founder Jamie Siminoff explained during the preview event, the company has been trying to build a workable camera drone for around a decade, but couldn't overcome certain design challenges until the advancement of AI models that allow the device to handle most of the computing—from route programming to threat detection—via the cloud, so the drones can be smaller and lighter.
According to Ring, when setting up the Ring Drone, you carry it around your house, allowing it to map the interior. It will "intelligently identify rooms and suggest patrol points: spots worth extra attention." When sent out on "patrol," the drone's AI pilot will travel between hotspots, sensing and avoiding furniture and other obstacles along the way.The Ring Drone works with other Ring cameras, so if an alert is triggered somewhere in your home—say, a window opening unexpectedly—the drone will take off to investigate. It has a built-in security light that will make its presence known, so it can also act as a deterrent, though the screaming sound of its spinning propellers will accomplish that just as well.
According to Ring, the drone camera can deliver peace of mind whether you're home or away, and admittedly I do like the idea of being able to check on my pets or make sure no pipes have burst while I'm at work or on vacation (though admittedly you can get the same sort of monitoring without involving an AI device that looks like a mini version of the flying robots from The Terminator).
The unsettling sound of security
I admit that the Ring Drone Camera seems pretty cool, provided I don't think about it too much. I don't know that I really feel the need to have every inch of my home covered in security cameras, but I do like the idea that the drone could, for example, go to check out what's going on if one of my smoke alarms' temperature sensors reports that one spot in the house is all of a sudden hotter than it should be.
But there's something slightly unsettling to me about the idea of a robot patrolling my home while I sleep. Yes, I know that there are privacy and security features in place—Ring says the videos its robots capture is protected by its "strongest default encryption yet"—but it's also yet one more example of how comfortable we've all gotten with cameras being absolutely everywhere, to the point that people think nothing of putting them all over their homes. (This is probably why I don't own a robot vacuum.) And it doesn't help that the drone sounds absolutely terrifying, which Ring claims is by design: "If someone’s there who shouldn’t be, a flying drone overhead...makes it clear they’ve been spotted. [The] devices are built to deter, not just monitor." True enough, but there's also no getting around the fact that drone propellers are unavoidably loud, and the sound of the Ring Drone Camera reminds me of nothing more than the screeching violins in a horror movie. (Note that the drone we were shown was white, but the final version sold will be dark grey.)
When you can buy the Ring Drone Camera
If you're ready to enter this brave new world of security, you'll have to wait a bit longer: The Ring Drone Camera isn't expected to ship until January 2027, but you can sign up to be alerted when it is available for preorder now.
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