Nest’s flagship Nest Cam home automation product is meant to work hand in hand with the Nest Aware subscription service, which Nest has demonstrated by adding automatic recognition of doors to Nest Cams with Nest Aware, as well as thumbnail previews for notifications, with those thumbnails being animated on qualifying devices, among other additions to the Nest app. Nest Cams are getting an algorithm that can automatically identify doors in a home and draw a border around them that the camera will monitor for activity. Whenever something happens at the door, such as somebody going to it or the door opening or closing, the Nest Cam’s owner will automatically receive a notification. Nest Protect notifications, such as carbon monoxide alerts, will now come with animated previews of all Nest Cam feeds in the house, allowing owners to quickly assess what sort of action is needed based on factors like what type of danger is present and who or what is in the house. The Nest app itself has picked up a few new features, as well.
As a bonus, the Android version of the app is now compatible with the App Shortcuts that can be accessed from certain home screen apps on Android 7.0 (Nougat) and up. The Nest app, when long-pressed, will now give users a list of the active Nest Cams in their home, labelled by name, and allow them to click on one to instantly go to its feed within the app. The in-app video history for Nest Aware customers has traditionally involved a lot of scrolling to find a particular video of interest, but Nest has alleviated this a bit in the latest update by allowing users to tap on a given date and go to that day’s saved videos instantly.
These new features are mostly centered around Nest Aware subscribers and for those subscribers, today’s updates should seriously cut down on needless notifications like the family pet wandering too close to a door, while providing a lot more information at a glance for the notifications that a user does get. The animated previews mentioned above, on that note, only work on Android 7.0 (Nougat) or higher, or iOS 10 or higher. For non-subscribers, today’s update boils down to the tweaks to Nest Protect and the way that the Nest app works.
