Barely more than a year ago, the idea of an AI-powered smart security camera that could describe what it was seeing truly blew our minds. Now, it’s becoming par for the home security course.
Just as it has in the general technology space, generative AI has begun to permeate the smart home and home security markets, from smart cams that can augment their video histories with self-generated captions to smart lights capable of creating lighting scenes using natural-language prompts.
The trend of AI in the smart home will be everywhere at this year’s edition of CES, where many–if not most–smart home and home security announcements will come with a generous sprinkling of LLM-powered features.
At the same time, another feature will be ubiquitous as far as smart home is concerned: Matter, the budding smart home standard that aims to unite the big smart ecosystems. That said, don’t expect any Matter security camera announcements at CES next month; we’ll explain why in a moment.
Gen AI, meet smart home
CES has become an increasingly big deal for smart home and home security (rivaled only by IFA, in Berlin), but at CES 2025, gen AI will be sharing—if not hogging—the spotlight.
To get an idea of the smart home-plus-AI announcements we might see at CES, just look at what we’ve already seen from the likes of Amazon’s Ring and Google’s Nest brands.
Earlier this year, Ring rolled out Smart Video Search, a feature that leverages AI-powered “Visual Language Modeling” to match captured video events with natural language search queries. In the real world, that means being able to find a video clip using by searching on, say, “racoon in the backyard last night.”
Google is doing something similar with its Nest cameras, which can now (provided you’re in the Google Home preview program) generate searchable text descriptions for saved videos, such as “the dog is digging in the garden” or “package with ballons.” Tap a video, and you’ll get an even more detailed description, courtesy of Google’s Gemini AI.
All this reminds us the Psync Camera Genie S, an AI-powered security cam unveiled last November that could write—or try to write, anyway—detailed descriptions of what it was seeing.
That was a unique feature a mere 13 months ago, albeit one that we called “more amusing than truly useful.” But today, AI-powered security cams that can describe what they’re seeing aren’t the novelty they used to be, and I’d be surprised if we didn’t see more of the same at CES this year.
Generative AI will continue to make its way into other smart home categories in Vegas. Think smart home systems that can generate their own automations based on your natural-language prompts (again, Google has already started down that path), or smart lights that can create lighting scenes from a short string of words (“a golden California sunset during the summer”).
Matter will matter even more at CES 2025
Launched two years ago with the promise of simplifying the thicket of competing smart home standards, Matter was initially anything but simple.
Positioned as the glue that would allow smart devices to work seamlessly with Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and other big smart home platforms, Matter arrived in fairly rough shape, with support for only a subset of device categories and a glitchy onboarding process.
Two years later, Matter has become proficient in many more device types, and its most recent update added a new multi-admin process that will—eventually—make it easier to add Matter devices to multiple smart home platforms at once.
Of course, it’s incumbent on device manufacturers to implement Matter’s new features in their products, so the days of Matter nirvana are still off in the distance.
Also, remember what I mentioned earlier about Matter and security cameras? For now, security cams aren’t included in the Matter specification (that could change as early as this year), so while we may see plenty of AI-powered cameras at CES 2025, the same won’t be true of Matter-enabled cams.
Still, the Matter logo will be a ubiquitous presence on the show floor in Las Vegas, and by CES 2026, security cameras likely will no longer be an exception.