Ring founder details the camera company’s ‘intelligent assistant’ era

What does it take to get one burned-out founder returns to the company he sold to Amazon? For Jamie Siminoff of video doorbell maker Ring, it was the potential of AI – and the Palisades fires that destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring itself.

Siminoff’s vision: Transform Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “intelligent assistant” for the whole home and beyond. A handful of new features furthering that goal shipped just ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, “unusual event” alerts, conversational AI, facial recognition features, and more. Some of these additions have not been without controversy, as consumers have to grapple with the amount of privacy they are giving up in favor of convenience and security. But together they point to Ring’s final phase of operations.

“Put AI backwards: it’s IA, it’s an intelligent assistant,” Siminoff explained in a talk at CES last week. “We’ll continue to do these things together that make us smarter, and ensure that there’s less cognitive load on you.”

By 2023, five years after selling Ring to Amazon, Siminoff had been running at full speed for so long that he invite. “I built the company in my garage… I was there for everything. Then we go to Amazon, and I go even faster – like more gas,” Siminoff told TechCrunch. “I didn’t go to Amazon and say, ‘I’m an excited entrepreneur, I’m going to chill out,’” he adds. “I blew the damn gas.”

When he later decided to leave the retail giant, he said it was because it felt like the time was right: Ring had delivered its products and was profitable. The advancement of AI soon made him reconsider his plans.

While Siminoff could have done anything, he wasn’t motivated to start anything new because the things he was most excited about were the things he wanted to build on the Ring platform.

“AI comes out and you realize, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much we can do,’” Siminoff said. “And then the fires happened,” he adds, referring to the devastating Palisades fires that struck Siminoff’s neighbors and burned the back of his house. destroying the garage where Ring was built.

One of Ring’s new additions, Fire Watch, is inspired by this tragedy. In partnership with nonprofit fire monitoring organization Watch Duty, Ring customers can sign up to share footage when a massive fire occurs, helping the organization build a better map that can be used to deploy firefighting resources more efficiently. In that case, the AI ​​is used to look for smoke, fire, embers and more in the shared images.

Another recently launched AI feature, Search Party, is also aimed at solving real-world problems as it helps people find their lost pets. This feature now reunites one family with their dogs per day – a rate higher than Siminoff expected.

“I had hoped to find one dog by the end of the first quarter… that was my goal. No one has ever done anything like this, and I just didn’t know how the AI ​​would work,” he admits. The AI, a kind of “facial recognition for dogs,” tries to match a posted image of a lost pet with Ring images, which users can share when they get an alert about a possible match.

However, other moves have raised concerns, especially those involving the company making deals with law enforcement agencies. In 2024, Ring ended a previous series of police partnerships that allowed police to request footage from Ring owners after some customer response. But this year the company moved forward with new deals companies such as Flock Safety and Axon, which reintroduced tools that allow law enforcement to once again request images and videos from Ring customers.

Siminoff defends the company’s decisions in this area, saying customers can choose whether or not to share their Ring images.

“The requesting agency doesn’t even know they asked you,” he says. That is, if police are looking for someone who has been breaking into cars in a certain geographic area, the alarm will sound and customers can respond if they wish. If customers refuse, it is anonymous.

He also points to the shooting at Brown University in December. A combination of surveillance cameras – included RingsSiminoff claims he helped find the mass shooter.

“The investigation is fine…I applaud it, but I’m glad we stood up to it because in the Brown shooting, the police needed this,” the founder said. “If we had given in to people’s ‘maybes’ and the criticism they gave us – [that] I don’t think this is correct; the police would have had no tool to help find this [shooter]and the community would not be able to share in what was happening so easily and so quickly.”

Despite the successful arrest of the shooting suspect, there are still to assure about what the increasing collection of data from private customers means for the country’s landscape. Additionally, some are concerned that the data could be misused to go after anyone the government decides to target.

Another AI feature: “Familiar faces”, has also received pushback from the consumer protection organization EFFtogether with a US senator.

The facial recognition feature uses AI to allow Ring to identify and store the faces of people who regularly enter and leave the home, including their names, if provided. For example, you can receive a notification that ‘mom’ is at the door, that the babysitter has arrived or that the children are home from school. The feature can also be used to disable alerts about people whose comings and goings don’t need to be closely monitored.

Siminoff also champions this as a way for Ring to become more personal to its users and tailor the software to their home’s unique “fingerprint.” That way, the customer doesn’t have to interact as much with Ring’s products unless it’s something that requires attention.

He said this addition builds on, rather than undermines, trust among Ring’s customers.

“Our products won’t be in neighbors’ homes if they don’t trust us… There is no incentive for us to do anything that would cause us to lose the trust of our neighbors in maintaining their privacy,” Siminoff says. “Anyone – and I would respect that – would take their camera away from their home if they felt like we were invading their privacy.”

But with Ring’s expansion into commercial camera systems, including mounted camerasa series of sensors and a solar powered one traileralso introduced just before CES, the company’s customer base will include not only neighbors protecting their homes, but also businesses, work sites, campuses, festivals, parking lots and everywhere else.