Ring’s Search Party feature can now reunite more lost dogs with their owners
Ring is making its Search Party feature available to non-camera owners in the US. It's already reuniting dogs with humans at a rate of more than one a day
Amazon owned smart home company Ring has announced its Search Party feature, designed to reunite lost dogs with their humans, is now available to everyone in the US.
The AI-powered feature taps into a neighbourhood network of Ring Video Doorbell and security cameras for potential sightings of our four legged friends and, even since its limited launch, has been responsible for bringing home more than one dog per day, on average.
Until today, it’s only been available to Ring camera owners in the US but now it’s live for non-hardware owners too, via the Ring app. That opens the door to everyone to enlist help with finding their errant best bud via other folks’ cameras.
The feature is quite clever. The dog owner uploads a photo of the missing dog and then AI computer vision is deployed to consult the footage from the cameras of neighbours who’ve opted in. If there’s a potential match, the camera owner will be pinged. They can see the missing dog and then choose to share that information with the person looking for their pupper. This can help narrow down the search and it also might enlist a few new helpers in looking for the dog.
“Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighbourhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them,” said Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s chief inventor. “Now, pet owners can mobilise the whole community—and communities are empowered to help—to find lost pets more effectively than ever before. That’s why we believe it’s so important to make this feature available to anyone who shares a lost dog post in Neighbours.”
Ring says lost pets are among the most common posts in the Ring Neighbours app, with more than one million reports of lost or found pets in the last year.
“Millions of dogs go missing in the U.S. every year, and it’s a terrible ordeal for them and their families,” Siminoff said. “We knew Search Party could help, but the speed and impact of these early reunions have blown us away.”
Chris Smith
