The Ring founder details the camera company’s “smart assistant” era

What will it take to bring a burned-out founder back to the company he sold to Amazon? For Jimmy Siminoff of video doorbell maker Ring, it was the potential of artificial intelligence — and the Palisades fires — that destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring itself.

Siminoff’s vision: Transform Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “smart assistant” for the entire home and beyond. A host of new features that advance this goal have been rolled out ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, alerts about “unusual events,” conversational AI, facial recognition features, and more. Some of these additions have not been without controversy, as consumers have to grapple with how much privacy they are giving up in favor of convenience and security. But together they mark the final stage of Ring’s work.

“Turn AI back — it’s IA, it’s an intelligent assistant,” Semenov explained in a talk at CES last week. “We keep doing these things together that make us smarter, and make it less cognitively burdensome for you.”

By 2023, five years after Ring was sold to Amazon, Siminoff had been running at full speed for so long that he needed to exit. “I built the company in my garage… and I was there for all of it,” Siminoff told TechCrunch. “And then we got to Amazon, and it went faster — like more speed.” “I didn’t go to Amazon and say, ‘I’m a retired businessman, and I’m just going to calm down,'” he adds. “I blew the fucking gas.”

When he later decided to leave the retail giant, he said it was because he felt the time was right — Ring had delivered on its products and was profitable. Soon, advances in artificial intelligence made him rethink his plans.

Although Siminoff could do anything, he wasn’t excited about starting something new because the things he was most excited about were the ones he wanted to build on the Ring platform.

“AI comes out, and you realize, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much more we can do,’” Semenov said. “And then the fires happened,” he adds, referring to the devastating Palisades fires that affected Siminoff’s neighbors and burned the back of his house, destroying the garage in which the Ring was built.

One of Ring’s new additions, Fire Watch, is inspired by this tragedy. In partnership with non-profit fire monitoring organization Watch Duty, Ring customers will be able to opt-in to share footage when a wildfire occurs, allowing the organization to build a better map that can be used to help deploy firefighting resources more efficiently. AI will be used in this case to search for smoke, fire, embers and more in shared shots.

Another recently launched AI feature, Search Party, also aims to solve real-world problems as it helps people find their lost pets. The feature now reunites one family a day with their dogs, a higher rate than Siminoff expected.

“I was hoping to find one dog by the end of the first quarter…that was my goal,” he admits. “No one had ever done anything remotely like this, and I didn’t know how AI would work.” The AI, a type of “facial recognition for dogs,” attempts to match a posted photo of a missing pet to Ring snapshots, which users choose to share if they receive an alert about a potential match.

However, other moves have raised concerns, particularly those that saw the company strike deals with law enforcement. In 2024, Ring ended a previous set of police partnerships that allowed police to request footage from Ring owners after backlash from some customers. But this year, the company has moved forward with new deals with companies like Flock Safety and Axon, which have reintroduced tools that once again allow law enforcement to request photos and videos from Ring customers.

Siminoff defends the company’s decisions in this area, saying customers can choose whether or not they want to share their Ring footage.

“The requesting agency doesn’t even know they asked you for it,” he says. That is, if police are looking for someone breaking into cars in a certain geographic area, an alert will be issued, and agents can respond if they choose. If customers refuse, it’s anonymous.

He also points to the shooting at Brown University in December. Siminoff claims an array of surveillance cameras, including a Ring camera, helped find the mass shooter.

“Scrutiny is good,” the founder says. “I welcome it, but I’m glad we addressed it, because in the Brown shooting, the police needed this.” “If we had given in to the ‘maybe’ people, and the scrutiny they were giving us – [that] I don’t think that’s true – the police didn’t have a tool to try to help find this out [shooter]The community did not have the ability to share what was happening so easily and so quickly.

Despite the success in capturing the shooting suspect, concerns remain about what increased data collection from private agents means for the country’s landscape. In addition, some worry that the data could be misused to go after anyone the government decides to target.

Another AI feature, “familiar faces,” has also received opposition from the consumer watchdog group EFF, along with a US senator.

Facial recognition uses artificial intelligence to allow Ring to identify and store the faces of people who come in and out of your home on a regular basis, including their names, if provided. This way, you can get an alert that “Mom” is at the front door, or that the babysitter has arrived, or that the kids have come home from school, for example. This feature can also be used to help disable alerts for people whose comings and goings do not need to be closely monitored.

Siminoff also advocates this as a way for Ring to become more personalized to its users and customize the software to adapt to their home’s unique “footprint.” 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 wouldn’t be in our neighbors’ homes if they didn’t trust us,” Semenov says. “There’s no incentive for us to do something that would lose trust with our neighbors in maintaining their privacy.” “Anyone – and I respect that – will take their camera out of their home if they feel we are violating their privacy.”

But as Ring expands into commercial camera systems, including mounted cameras, an array of sensors, and a solar-powered trailer, which it also introduced just before CES, the company’s customer base will become not just neighbors protecting their homes but also businesses, job sites, college campuses, festivals, parking lots, and everywhere else.