Amazon announces that it’s adding Alexa to the Ring Video Doorbell Pro, giving it the opportunity to talk to people when they come to your home. This feature is called Alexa Greetings and requires you to have a Ring Protect subscription, starting at $ 3 per month. If you do, Alexa can ask your visitors what they want, and they can choose to leave a video recording as a message. If they are a delivery person, Alexa will be able to tell them where to leave the packages behind, if they accept that the delivery person is willing to talk to your robot doorbell.
In addition to automating the taking of video messages and sending deliveries, it is unclear whether Alexa will offer additional features.
The company also announces a Quick Replies feature, which should work on most of its doorbells without the need for registration (although the company’s cheapest doorbell, the $ 60 Ring Video Doorbell Wired, does not get the feature either ). With the feature you can select a canned response, such as’ we can not answer the door now, but if you want to leave a message, you can do so now ‘or’ please leave the package outside. If you want to leave a message, you can do so now. ‘Of course there are also answers that let the person at your door know that you will be there in just a moment.
Lastly, Amazon is also bringing a motion alert to some of its doorbells and cameras, which will audibly tell anyone that Ring is recording when it detects motion.
All of the new features can be turned on or off in the Ring app, so if you do not want Alexa to answer the door for you, you simply cannot enable the feature. If we also add new features to the Ring Doorbells, it would be great to add a touchless doorbell feature (especially since most of these new features actually have to push the button).
The announcements come at a time when the company is both being criticized for collaborating with police to deliver footage captured by Ring cameras and to increase the camera’s appeal to privacy-centric users through end-to-end encryption test support.