What does it take to bring a burnt-out founder back to the company he sold to Amazon? For Jamie Siminoff of video doorbell maker Ring, that’s the potential of AI. and the Palisades fire that destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring.
Siminoff’s vision is to transform Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “intelligent assistant” that can be used throughout the home and beyond. Several new features that advance that goal, including fire alarms, “unusual event” alerts, conversational AI, and facial recognition capabilities, shipped just before this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Some of these additions are not without controversy, as consumers have to grapple with how much privacy they give up in favor of convenience and security. But together they represent the latest phase of Ring’s business.
“We’re taking AI in the opposite direction. It’s IA, it’s intelligent assistant,” Siminoff explained in a conversation at CES last week. “As we continue to do these things together, we become smarter and reduce the cognitive load on you.”
By 2023, five years after selling Ring to Amazon, Siminoff had been running at full throttle for so long that he had to quit his job. “I started the company in my garage…I’ve been there for all of it. Then it gets to Amazon and I go even faster, which means I throttle up even more,” Siminoff told TechCrunch. “I didn’t go to Amazon and say, ‘I’m a retired entrepreneur, so I’m just going to settle down,'” he added. “I caused the gas to explode.”
When Ring later decided to exit the retail giant, it said it was because it was delivering products and making a profit and felt the time was right. Advances in AI soon caused him to rethink his plans.
Mr. Siminov could have done anything, but he had no desire to start something new because what he was most excited about was what he wanted to build on Ring’s platform.
“When AI comes along, you realize, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much we can do,'” Siminoff said. “And then the fire broke out,” he added, referring to the devastating Palisades fire that affected Siminoff’s neighbors, burned the back of the house and destroyed the garage where the ring was built.
One of Ring’s new additions, Fire Watch, was inspired by this tragedy. The partnership with Watch Duty, a nonprofit fire watchdog organization, will allow Ring customers to opt-in to share footage during large fire outbreaks, allowing organizations to build better maps that can be used to deploy firefighting resources more efficiently. In this case, AI is used to look for smoke, fire, embers, etc. in the shared footage.
Search Party, another recently released AI feature, also aims to solve real-world problems by helping people find lost pets. Thanks to this, one family per day is now reunited with their dog, a rate higher than Siminoff expected.
“I wanted to find one dog by the end of the first quarter…that was my goal. No one had done remote control like this before. I had no idea how AI worked,” he admits. A kind of “facial recognition for dogs,” the AI attempts to match posted images of lost pets with Ring footage, and users choose to share the footage if they receive an alert about a possible match.
But other moves, particularly the company’s contracts with law enforcement agencies, are raising concerns. In 2024, Ring ended an earlier series of police partnerships that had allowed police to request footage from Ring owners after customer backlash. But this year, the company moved forward with new deals with companies like Flock Safety and Axon, and reintroduced tools that allow law enforcement to once again request images and videos from Ring customers.
Siminoff defended the company’s decisions in this area, saying customers can choose whether to share footage of the Ring.
“The requesting agency doesn’t even know they asked you,” he says. This means that if police are looking for someone who has broken into cars in a particular area, an alert will be raised and customers can take action if they wish. If the customer declines, it will be anonymous.
He also mentioned the Brown University shooting in December. A combination of surveillance cameras, including the Ring, helped find the shooter, Siminoff claims.
“Surveillance is fine… we welcome it, but I’m glad we took a stand because the police needed this in the Brown shooting,” the founders say. “If we had succumbed to people’s ‘what ifs’ and the scrutiny they are giving us — (which I don’t think is right) — law enforcement wouldn’t have had the tools to help find this (the shooter), and the community wouldn’t have been able to share what’s going on so easily and so quickly.”
Despite the successful arrest of the suspected shooter, concerns remain about what increased data collection from private customers will mean for the country’s landscape. Additionally, some worry that the data could be misused to track people the government decides to target.
Another AI feature, Familiar Faces, has also faced opposition from consumer protection group EFF, along with US senators.
Facial recognition uses AI to enable Ring to identify the faces of people who enter and exit your home on a regular basis and save them, including their names if you provide them. This way, you can receive alerts when, for example, “mom” is at the door, the babysitter has arrived, or the kids are home from school. This feature can also be used to disable alerts for people coming and going that you don’t need to closely monitor.
Siminoff also defends this as a way for Ring to customize the software to become more personalized to the user and adapt to the unique “fingerprint” of their home. That way, customers will have less need to interact with Ring’s products unless something requires attention.
He insists that this addition does not undermine Ring’s trust with customers, but rather builds on it.
“If our neighbors don’t trust us, our products won’t be in their homes… We have no incentive to do anything that would jeopardize our neighbors’ trust in terms of maintaining privacy,” Siminoff says. “Anyone, and I respect that, would remove cameras from their home if they felt we were invading their privacy.”
But Ring’s expansion into commercial camera systems, including mounted cameras, arrays of sensors, and solar-powered trailers, also introduced just before CES, will expand the company’s customer base beyond just neighbors guarding their homes to businesses, job sites, campuses, festivals, parking lots, and everywhere else.
