SimpliSafe’s Active Guard Outdoor Protection lets live agents watch your property - The Verge

By Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, a smart home reporter who’s been testing connected gadgets since 2013. Previously a contributor to Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, and US News.

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Home security company SimpliSafe has launched its new live monitoring feature — Active Guard Outdoor Protection. Announced earlier this year, the service is powered by a new outdoor camera that uses on-device and cloud-based AI to alert call center agents about potential threats on your property. The agent then gets access to a live view through the camera and can talk to any potential intruder and either deter the threat or call emergency services.

Active Guard has been running in a public beta since April of this year and is now available to all SimpliSafe users. It costs $49.99 a month for overnight live guard monitoring (8PM to 6AM) or $79.99 for 24/7 live guard monitoring. Both prices include SimpliSafe’s 24/7 professional alarm monitoring of security sensors and its live indoor monitoring service, which was launched last year and requires a compatible camera.

Essentially, this new feature lets you pay someone to watch your security cameras for you. Instead of you having to react to a “person alert” from a security camera at 2 a.m., SimpliSafe’s agents can stay up all night for you.

Ring offers a similar service for its cameras, but its Live Guard feature costs $100 a month, which is on top of its standard home alarm monitoring. Starting at $50 a month, Simplisafe’s offering is impressively affordable for this type of service.

SimpliSafe’s SVP of product, Hooman Shahidi, explained to The Verge how the service works. When the system is armed and the camera detects a person using on-device AI the footage is sent to the cloud for confirmation and to match against any trusted faces you’ve uploaded to your SimpliSafe app. Then, it's sent to a live agent who can view the data and access the live camera feed to confirm if it’s a friend or potential foe and assess the situation in real-time. Shahidi said if it’s a stranger, the agent will engage with the person “in a friendly manner,” escalating if necessary.

So, if it’s a delivery driver, the agent will watch until they leave and notify you that a package was delivered and when. But if it’s someone trying to break in or do damage, they’ll call the police directly and inform you in real time through app notifications.

Active Guard requires SimpliSafe’s new Outdoor Camera 2, which is also launching this week. The camera costs $199.99 and has upgraded on-device processing from the original outdoor camera, plus improved night vision and better audio.

A battery-powered camera, it comes with a power cable and must be continuously powered to work with Active Guard. Shahidi says customers with the current outdoor camera can get a discount on upgrading to the new one by calling customer service.

“We are adding generative AI to help understand situational context,” Christian Cerda

The company is particularly excited about the potential of this technology to reduce false alarms and cut down on crime in general. “Ninety percent of alarms are false,” said Christian Cerda, CEO at SimpliSafe, in an interview with The Verge. “And often, you wait over 10 minutes for a response. We are trying to help inform first responders so they can prioritize their resources.”

Additionally, Cerda sees this technology as moving home security from passive to active, preventing crime instead of trying to stop it once it’s begun. The company has begun deploying using generative AI to identify potential scenarios faster. “We are adding generative AI to help understand situational context, first to provide that info to the agent, then long term to filter out benign situations,” he says. “The prompt engineering uses our known experience of what is usually suspicious behavior. We can apply that to ask the AI to more narrowly look for that.

“For example, lawn services behave in a certain way; have specific movement and equipment; someone passing by usually moves with a consistent speed, whereas we know that intruders scan the property,” he says. “This is where we are finding incredible depth and value in generative AI.” However, he says they are being “extremely cautious,” that it is still early days, and that the agent always makes the final determination.

Active Outdoor Guard Protection is now available to all US-based SimpliSafe customers for $49.99. The service and the new camera can be ordered at SimpliSafe.com.

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