Your Ring Doorbell set for smart upgrade but you'll have to pay more to use it

If you have a Ring Doorbell attached to the front of your house you may be in for a big free update today. These clever tech gadgets replace traditional doorbells by adding a camera and various sensors, all controlled through an app on your smartphone that lets you see who’s at the door and even chat to them if you’re not in.

It’s not just a live feed that’s available though, with Ring Doorbells able to capture and store hours, days and even weeks of footage. This lets you go back through what it has captured to see if that delivery driver really did put the package where they said they did, see when your neighbour popped round to give you back your drill, or check which vehicle clipped your wing mirror the other day on the way past.

As long as you pay for any of Ring’s subscription tiers, which start at £4.99 per month, you get 180 days of Event History, which is footage from every Doorbell ring, motion sensed activity or Live View event, where you can tune in to see things at any time.

With so much footage to trawl through, finding specific events can be tricky. That’s why Ring has just just added a brand new feature called Smart Video Search, which is what the company describes as: “a new AI feature which makes it simple for customers to find specific moments in their Ring Event History.”

“Smart Video Search helps keep you close to the things that matter, like your family, pets, home or personal interests like wildlife,” Ring, which is owned by Amazon, said in a blog post.

“It can help you answer everyday questions, like when the kids got home from school. You might search for “fox in the back garden last night” and find the answer to why those bins were knocked over, while searching for “red bicycle in the driveway” might turn up endearing videos of your oldest child teaching your youngest how to ride a bike.”

This sounds like a handy way to find the video you’re searching for to confirm what the noise was in the night or to find a funny moment worth saving. Ring said the new Smart Video Search uses its own in-house AI tech paired with Visual Language Modelling (VLM) to match search requests to images and video from Event History.

Ring said the feature is out now in beta, which means it’s available but is still being tested and ironed out, so you may encounter bugs. There’s also a catch in that the new Smart Video Search is only currently available to those paying the most expensive Ring subscription, the £15.99 per month Premium package.

If you pay for the £4.99 Basic or £7.99 Standard tier, you’re out of luck.

Amazon is currently hosting its Spring Deal Days sale event, where we’ve picked out a great deal on the Ring Battery Video Doorbell and Chime bundle, which is currently just £69.99, a saving of £59.99.