Ring has announced that its AI-powered Smart Video Search will roll out in a public beta today (26 March 2025) for UK customers who subscribe to the Ring Home Premium plan (£15.99 a month or £159.99 per year).
Rather than forcing users to scroll through a timeline or the events section of the app, Smart Video Search allows for natural language search, typing a request into the app. Visual Language Modelling (VLM) lets the text be matched to images to quickly deliver only the relevant clips. For example, “red truck in the driveway” or “fox in the garden” is all that’s needed to find matching clips.
As the technology works with the stored video clips online, Smart Video Search is compatible with all of Ring’s doorbells and security cameras, including the Ring Battery Video Doorbell Pro and the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera.
There are clear benefits for security reasons, such as quickly finding a clip of when your car was taken off the drive, but Ring says that the technology has wider appeal, such as finding specific wildlife in and around your garden, or even working out who ate the last of the ice cream.
Search queries can include animals, locations, packages, people, time, vehicles and weather, and even activities, such as jumping and playing. As noted above, the Smart Video Search is only available to those on the highest tier of the Ring Home subscription service.
As to whether it’s worth upgrading to the higher tier, that will have to wait until we’ve had a chance to properly test and review the service. Look out for our full review, soon.
