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If you ask Psync Labs it ll tell you the problem with smart security cameras is that they don t know what they re seeing Those motion pings you get with other products Defined by how light shifts in front of its sensor treating an approaching figure or low flying bird with equal alarm So Psync s focus is to improve machine vision but to also go one step further and pair this vision with GPT enabled generative AI to help it and you understand what it can see Its first product the Genie S is a security camera that ll send you a written description of what it thinks is going on On paper the Genie S has a similar feature set to plenty of other affordable home security units I could mention There s a powered pan tilt base five megapixel camera outputting K Video four LEDs a microphone and speaker But there are differences like the fact it s in the shape of a cube that when it s not activated points the lens toward the base Psync says it s the most compact camera in its class but probably not by as big a margin as the company hopes Setup is easy enough put it on a table or use the screw mount to place it somewhere more esoteric plug in the six foot long USB C cable and you re on your way Psync says that a smarter camera will be better equipped to capture what s going on at home but that s not its best use case VP of marketing Echo Wong says that the hardware is able to record those memorable moments that fly by quicker than we can pull out our phones But I don t think you would want to buy this on the off chance it catches junior s first word or steps The more prosaic sales line the one that probably wouldn t fly as well is that it s a security camera with the added promise of not bugging you with needless pings because of the promise of AI smarts Buy one of these and you ll get the choice of a unit with GB built in storage for or GB for I mention this up front because we re very much in you get what you pay for territory in terms of the picture and sound quality It shoots vertically oriented K video but the clips are pretty fuzzy even if you can zoom in to get some halfway useful detail if required It doesn t like too much light so if it s pointed at a window and or anything reflective then chunks of the image will get blown out Similarly the sound quality is something of a throwback to an earlier age of crunchy over compressed streams You ll get similarly crunchy audio using the talk feature which has similarly walkie talkie vibes that you won t find on pricier hardware Psync Labs Of course that s not what anyone is here for but to see what this new company ーof which little is known ーhas cooked up with AI ViewSay is Psync s transcription tool which uses GPT a form of generative AI to essentially let the camera describe in text what it s seeing ViewSay which currently costs cents a month promises to identify objects sort events that triggered the recording in a visual timeline let you search through the clips with text and of course the aforementioned written pings Pay your fee set this up and your phone will ping when it spots something interesting and give you the best description of what is going on that it can manage Users can also set specific categories like quot Person quot quot Vehicle quot quot Pet quot and will eventually be able to craft tailored alerts like quot a dog jumps on the couch quot for alerts nbsp Oh but there is a catch ーbecause that fairly reasonable cents a month is just a limited time trial before leaping up to a month Which we can all agree is more than a little bit too much to spend on a product like this especially in this economic climate nbsp ViewSay is currently in beta and while the app splash to get you to sign up promises plenty the company is keen to keep expectations low My impression so far is that while Psync has the bones of a workable idea here in theory the nitty gritty of practice isn t I pointed the camera at a neutral corner in my office and play acted in front of it to see what it would do My fake phone call where I learned that my fictional wife had discovered the secret to perpetual motion went unremarked upon and undocumented Well kinda the camera pinged my phone to say that A man is sitting in a chair in a room looking at his reflection in a mirror nbsp Actually I m being unfair since the system can also make fairly accurate guesses at other times Like while I was setting the hardware up late one evening I got a ping to tell me that a man is sitting on the floor holding a cell phone in his hand A few days later I pointed the camera at a TV which was turned off and the Echo Show that was in front of it I then turned back to use my laptop which I think was only really visible in the reflection on the TV s screen Not long after the app pinged to say it could see a A man is sitting in front of a laptop looking at the screen and possibly using it for work or entertainment purposes Now this was either a massively lucky guess a false positive or a sign of how accurate this will be in future Photo by Daniel Cooper Engadget When it detects something going on in this manner the system records a second clip to its local storage These clips are retained for at least days and when you ve looked at them in the app you re also able to save them to your phone I understand you ll also be able to take longer clips when motion is detected but that feature doesn t yet appear to be available You ll also be able to share a live feed of your camera using WebRTC to up to four viewers through a browser for up to minutes at a time You might be wondering about how secure all of this is and what exactly is happening to your data Psync told me that its AI model is based on an AWS instance and the footage is protected using bit AES encryption The footage recorded will be stored on the device locally but the initial frame of the video is sent to the cloud for further analysis As something of an AI skeptic and someone who isn t thrilled at wiring up every corner of my home with a camera I m by default hostile to Psync s plan here But I can at least see where Psync is looking to add value to the standard security camera proposition If you re out and about and you get a ping saying there s a person in your living room when there shouldn t be then that s pretty helpful Especially if you can just tune into the live feed and see for yourself what s going on and if you need to do something about it As much as the macro story is scary I can understand the logic someone would apply to buy one or two of these But it s worth saying too that what I just described isn t yet what Psync is selling only what it is gesturing toward The system will require more training and plenty more data from a broader user base until it can start offering you more concrete descriptions Now I m sure that in a year or two that will be the case but until then you re essentially buying into an ecosystem where you re paying for the privilege of being a beta tester This article originally appeared on Engadget at