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TechRadar
David Nield

Your Ring camera is about to get smarter with Single Event Alert – and it should mean fewer notifications

Ring Single Event Alert.
  • Ring is introducing Single Event Alert for Premium subscribers
  • The feature uses AI to consolidate the number of alerts you see
  • When there's a flurry of activity, you'll just get a single summary

One of the annoyances of setting up motion detection alerts on your home security camera is that you tend to get a flurry of unnecessary alerts all related to the same event – something which Ring is now trying to tackle with a new AI-powered feature.

It's called Single Event Alert, and as the name suggests, it'll wrap all the motion alerts from the same event into a single notification. It could be the kids playing in the garden, for example, or a delivery driver going back and forth trying to find the right address.

The AI part of it is the way your camera will be able to recognize the same thing happening multiple times – think a gardener trimming hedges – and, in theory, be smart enough to only tell you about it once.

"AI Single Event Alert addresses one of the most common customer frustrations – notification fatigue," explains Ring in its official blog post. "Constant alerts can make it difficult to focus and even harder to tell what's urgent".

'Awareness and peace of mind'

Single Event Alert is going to consolidate your notifications (Image credit: Ring)

The problem with getting too many alerts from your security cameras is that you then tend to ignore them, or think of them as low priority. That means when something important does happen, it might be a while until you realize.

Hopefully, this will help to tackle that notification overload – a "balance between awareness and peace of mind", as Ring puts it. It joins two other AI features on the devices, Video Descriptions (summaries of what's happened), and Smart Video Search.

Like those other AI features though, Single Event alert is only going to be available to Ring Premium Subscribers. That will set you back $19.99 / £15.99 AU$29.95 a month, and for now it's limited to users in the US and Canada.

It's good to see security cameras getting smarter, though it's not so good that this will be yet another paywalled feature pushing you towards a subscription. You can find models with and without subscriptions attached in our best home security cameras guide.

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