Nest unveils Nest Cam IQ with 4K sensor and facial recognition technology

Nest, a home automation company has been helping users to spy on their babysitters and house cleaners, or just watch over their homes with Nest cam, security cameras. Now the Alphabet-owned company is launching a long-awaited update with Nest Cam IQ, to further enhance the experience with Artificial Intelligence.

Nest Cam IQ, company's new indoor security camera includes an 8-megapixel, 4K HDR image sensor that allows for 12X digital zoom around its 130-degree view of a room, providing a clear picture of the intruder, if any. The company claims that Cam IQ will also distinguish between a person, a pet or a shadow on the wall before it sends an alert.

The company has also included two 940-nanometer infrared LEDs for video images, a feature borrowed from the Nest Outdoor Camera released last year. These two infrared LEDs make it easier to monitor movement when it’s dark without the red glow that accompanies many nighttime images.

Plus, with a new feature called “Supersight,” users will get a picture-in-picture inset of any people in frame tracked close-up, in addition to a 130-degree wide-angle look at the whole field of view the camera can capture.

With an outer multicolour LED to let users know exactly when Nest Cam IQ is active, the camera records video in 1080p. The camera has also been upgraded with speakers that are seven times as powerful as those in the original Nest Cam, and there’s a three microphone array onboard to offer up better background noise suppression and to help cancel out echoes.

Customers who subscribe to Nest Aware, a service that can store 30 days worth of video, will have access to cloud-based algorithms that rely on Google’s AI. Face-recognition technology, for example, can identify family members and learn to differentiate them from strangers. Audio alerts are also being made available to Nest Cam and Nest Cam Outdoor owners via Nest Aware.

“At I/O last week, Sundar Pichai was saying we are an AI-first company. Well, this is a direct application of that AI technology for a very specific use case, which is a static camera inside a home,” Maxime Veron, Nest’s head of product marketing, told VentureBeat.

“We have a whole roadmap ahead of us,” Veron added. “There is a lot that we will be doing together in the future.”

Audio alerts will be sent when the camera’s microphones recognise a person speaking or a dog barking out of range while filtering out a podcast or radio station in the next room. Person Alerts come standard, meaning users will receive notifications and a zoomed in picture whenever it finds a person in its field of view.

With a price tag of $299, Nest Cam IQ is available for pre-order in the U.S. now. Nest Cam IQ will launch pre-orders in some other markets shortly and is expected to ship starting at the end of June.