Ring AI Features Are Getting Scarily Smart – And I Have Thoughts

If you caught the Super Bowl this year, you may have seen the Ring “Search” commercial. The idea was simple enough: if your dog gets loose, Ring cameras in your neighborhood can work together to help track it down. On paper, that sounds great. In practice, people immediately started asking the obvious question – if it can find a dog, what stops it from finding a person?

Ring caught some heat over it, tried to soften the messaging, and then the whole thing kind of faded from the news cycle. I figured that was the end of it. I was wrong.

Wait, When Did My Ring Get This Smart?

A few weeks back I was sitting at my desk and my Apple Watch starts buzzing with Ring notifications. Nothing unusual about that. But the alerts themselves? That was new.

Instead of the usual “A person was detected on your front porch,” I was getting things like:

• “Someone is kneeling and bending on your porch”
• “An Amazon package has been left on your porch”
• “Someone is picking up a package on your porch”
• “A person is walking from your garage to the paved area”
• “Someone is walking on the lawn with a brown dog”

A brown dog. My Ring camera told me there was a brown dog on my lawn. That is a level of detail I have never seen before from this thing. I actually turned to my wife and asked if she was getting the same weirdly specific alerts. She was.

Turns out Ring had quietly given my account a free trial of their new Ring AI features. And honestly? My first reaction was kind of impressed. If a person is walking across the lawn with a dog, that is almost certainly me or my wife. If someone is picking up a package from the porch, it is probably her grabbing the Amazon delivery. That kind of context is actually useful. I get it.

But here is where my brain started to go sideways.

Useful Now, But What Comes Next?

The Ring AI features we have today can already tell the difference between adults and children, identify the color of vehicles in your driveway, and distinguish between pets and people. That is not a small thing. That is a system that is learning to understand what it is looking at in real time.

So where does it go from here? If it can already do all of that, individual identification seems like the natural next step. And I do not know how I feel about walking up to a friend’s porch and having his phone buzz with an alert that says “Walt from WaltInPA is here.”

For me personally, I am not too worked up about it. I am long past the days of doing anything that would make me nervous about being on camera. But my kids? That is a different story. The idea of my daughter walking over to the neighbor’s house and that family getting an AI-generated alert identifying her by name – that is not something I am comfortable with. Not even a little.

This Is Not New – But It Is Getting More Personal

To be fair, I am not pretending this kind of thing does not already exist. Meta has been using facial recognition for years. I have a buddy who got permanently banned from Instagram for posting a movie quote the platform did not like. He eventually tried to come back with a new email and a fresh account. Everything was fine until he posted a selfie. Instagram recognized his face, and he was gone again.

It gets better. His girlfriend posted a photo of the two of them on her account and suddenly she had to go through a full real-time face verification process because a banned person showed up in her photo. We are talking head-tracking, live camera stuff – like setting up Face ID on a new phone. Just to prove that she was her and not him.

So yeah, this technology is already out there and already being used. The Ring AI features just bring it a lot closer to home. Literally.

What Does the Ring AI Plan Actually Cost?

After I realized I was on a free trial, I went looking at the pricing. Here is where things got a little frustrating.

I already pay $100 a year for the basic Ring Plan. That gets you live two-way talk when someone hits the doorbell, cloud video storage, and a few other things that honestly make the camera worth using. If you have a Ring doorbell and you are not on a paid plan, I would genuinely tell you to look at other options because the free experience is pretty limited.

But the Ring AI features? Those are another $100 a year on top of that. So you are looking at $200 a year total.

Am I going to pay $200 a year to get a notification that there is a brown dog on my lawn? No. I am not. The basic plan does what I need it to do, and I will deal with the generic alerts.

What does bother me is the broader trend here. AI add-ons are becoming their own separate subscription tier everywhere you look. Google Workspace users have to pay extra for Gemini features that free Gmail users get included. ChatGPT is around $30 a month. Claude is in that same range. Grok has a premium tier. It adds up fast, especially when you are already paying for Netflix, Prime, Paramount Plus, and all the other stuff that somehow crept into your monthly budget.

I get why it costs money. AI processing uses a lot of computing power and energy. But I do hope we get to a point where some of these features just come baked into the products we already pay for, rather than being their own separate line item every single time.

Where Do You Stand on This?

The Ring AI features are genuinely impressive. I will give them that. But impressive and comfortable are two different things, and right now I am somewhere in the middle. Cool technology, real privacy questions, and a pricing model that is hard to justify for what you actually get.

I talked through all of this in more detail on the latest motovlog. Check it out and let me know where you land on the whole thing.

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