What is needed to bring a founder burned back to the company that sold to Amazon? For Jamie Siminoff of video doorbell maker Ring, it was the potential of AI — and the Palisades fires destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring itself.
Siminoff’s vision: turn Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “smart assistant” for the whole home and beyond. A handful of new features furthering that goal are shipping just ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, “unusual event” notifications, conversational AI, facial recognition features, and more. Some of these additions have not been without controversy, as consumers have to deal with the degree of privacy they are giving up for convenience and security. But together, they mark the final phase of Ring’s activities.
“Turn AI backwards — it’s IA, it’s an intelligent assistant,” Siminoff explained in a chat at CES last week. “We’re continuing to do these things together that make us smarter, and we’re doing it so that, for you, there’s less cognitive load.”
By 2023, five years after selling Ring to Amazon, Siminoff had been running full throttle for so long that needs out. “I built the company in my garage… I was there for everything. Then we get to Amazon and I go even faster — like, more gas,” Siminoff told TechCrunch. “I didn’t come to Amazon and say, ‘I’m a retired entrepreneur, I’m just going to relax,'” he adds. “I passed f**king gas.”
When he later decided to leave the retail giant, he said it was because he felt the time was right — Ring had delivered and was profitable. The advancement of AI soon made him rethink his plans.
While Siminoff could do 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 gosh, there’s so much we can do,'” Siminoff said. “And then the fires happened,” he adds, referring to the devastating Palisades fires that tore through Siminoff’s neighbors and burned the back of his home. destroying the garage where the Ring was built.
One of the Ring’s new additions, the Fire Watch, was inspired by this tragedy. Working with non-profit fire monitoring organization Watch Duty, Ring customers will be able to choose to share video when a mass fire event occurs, allowing the organization to create a better map that can be used to more effectively deploy firefighting resources. Artificial intelligence will be used in this case to look for smoke, fire, embers and more in the shared material.
Another recently launched AI feature, Search Party, also aims to solve real-world problems by helping people find their lost pets. This feature now reunites one family a day with their dogs—a rate higher than Siminoff expected.
“I was hoping to find a dog by the end of the 1st trimester…that was my goal. No one had ever done anything remotely like this and I just didn’t know how the AI would work,” she admits. The AI, a kind of “canine facial recognition,” tries to match a posted picture of a lost pet with footage from Ring that users choose to share if they receive an alert about a potential match.
Other moves, however, have raised concerns, particularly those that have led the company to deals with law enforcement. In 2024, Ring it’s over an earlier set of police partnerships that allowed police to request video from Ring owners after some backlash from customers. But this year, the company entered into new agreements with companies such as Flock Safety and Axon, which brought back tools that once again allow law enforcement to request images and videos from Ring customers.
Siminoff defends the company’s decisions in this space, saying customers can choose whether or not they want to share Ring hardware.
“The requesting agency doesn’t even know they asked you,” he says. That is, if the police are looking for someone who has broken into cars in a certain geographic area, the alert will go off 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 — including of the ringclaims Siminoff, helped find the mass shooter.
“The audit is fine … I welcome it, but I’m glad we responded to it, because in the Brown shooting, the police needed that,” says the founder. “If we had given in to people’s maybes and the control they gave us— [that] I don’t think it’s right – the police wouldn’t have a tool to try to help find that [shooter]and the community wouldn’t have been able to share what was happening so easily and so quickly.”
Despite the successful arrest of the shooting suspect, there are yet concerns on what the increasing collection of data by private customers means for the landscape of the country. Additionally, some worry that the data could be misused to go after anyone the government decides to target.
Another AI feature, “Famous faces”, also received reactions from the consumer protection organization EFFtogether with a US senator.
The facial recognition feature uses artificial intelligence to allow Ring to recognize and store the faces of people entering and leaving the home on a regular basis, including their names if provided. That way, you could get a notification that “mom” is at the front door, or that the babysitter has arrived, or that the kids are home from school, for example. The feature could also be used to help turn off notifications for people whose comings and goings don’t need to be closely monitored.
Siminoff also defends it as a way for Ring to become more personalized to its users and tailor the software to fit the unique “fingerprint” of their home. This way, the customer has to interact less with Ring products unless it’s something that requires attention.
He argues that this addition builds on trust with Ring customers, rather than undermining it.
“Our products won’t be in neighbors’ homes if they don’t trust us…There’s no incentive for us to do anything that will lose trust with our neighbors to preserve their privacy,” says Siminoff. “Anyone – and I would respect that – would take their camera out of their house if they felt we were invading their privacy.”
But with Ring’s expansion into commercial camera systems, incl mounted camerasan array of sensors and a solar power caravanalso unveiled just before CES, the company’s customer base will not only be neighbors protecting their homes, but also businesses, workplaces, college campuses, festivals, parking lots and anywhere else.
