Seemour: AI-Powered Visual Intelligence Platform Revolutionizes Home Security and Smart Home Experience

This AI Startup Promises to Erase People From Home Security Videos -- And Much More

Expertise Smart home | Smart security | Home tech | Energy savings | A/V You can find AI nearly everywhere today, and home security cameras are no exception thanks to the extensive AI video searches now offered by Google Gemini, Ring and many other brands. But startup Prompt AI and its Seemour platform (announced today) promise to go several steps further, into AI features I've never seen on a security cam before. Seemour's third-party AI focuses on visual intelligence, with training on things like objects and movement that allows it to analyze everything your home security cams are seeing. Most home security cameras can do this -- Arlo, for example, now allows you to label custom objects for AI identification -- but Seemour goes a step beyond. In addition to video summaries and personalized notifications about what it sees, Seemour touts a collection of much more unique tricks, notably the ability to learn your pets by name for more accurate notifications and the "coming soon" ability to recognize specific individuals and remove them from video footage, increasing their privacy around the home. Seemour's full promised list also includes other AI responses I haven't seen in home security systems before, such as specific notifications about wildlife, the ability to recognize and report a delivery (as opposed to just a package) and the ability to watch for suspicious human movement (a feature usually focused on commercial cams). Prompt AI also plans on giving the platform the ability to ask Seemour questions the same way Google Gemini currently operates, like, "Where did I put my keys?" And it's planning on incorporating specific activity alerts like a dog starting to dig a hole, something we've seen pet companies like Furbo experiment with as well. "Imagine a future where you can ask your home what happened today or inform your roommate that you've stepped out to go to the grocery store when they open the fridge," said Tete Xiao, chief executive officer and co-founder of Prompt AI. "That future is closer than you think, and we're excited to bring it to you." The Seemour app is currently available on the Apple Store (don't confuse it for Seymour.ai, a very different service) but hasn't yet come to Android. We'll make time to experiment with it ourselves and see how good the AI training is, but you can test it out yourself, too...with one caveat. It's difficult enough to trust a well-established security brand like Nest or Ring to analyze your video with AI, let alone a startup. Using Seemour is going to take some trust on your part as Prompt AI doesn't have much of a security track record yet and will need plenty of information on you and your pets, as well as access to your video feeds. It's also harder to ask consumer to adopt a third-party app for their videos than simply rely on what the security cam brand has already included, which is why I expect Seemour is probably aiming for eventual built-in integrations as well. That said, Seemour has an impressive list of potential capabilities, features I fully expect to come to other home security AIs in one form or another in the coming years. For now, Seemour seems to be first out of the gate for several of them, and I'll be keeping an eye on the service.

Prompt AI's Seemour launches visual intelligence platform for the home

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Prompt AI, a smart home and visual intelligence research and technology company, has launched Seemour, a visual intelligence platform for the home. Founded by leading scientists and pioneers of computer vision, Seemour is designed to understand, describe, and act on what it sees in real time when connected to a home camera. Seemour can summarize moments or hours of video footage, learn the names of family, friends, and pets, and even inform you which delivery service is at your door. Seemour is like if your home could talk, helping you feel safer and more connected to what's happening around you, said Tete Xiao, CEO of Seemour, in an interview with GamesBeat. Xiao started the company with fellow doctorate candidates and a professor from the University of California at Berkeley. (Go Bears). They started thinking about the combo of home cameras, which proliferated during the pandemic, and the explosion of AI and started the company in late 2023. "We started the company to focus on visual intelligence, with streaming cameras as our first product," Xiao said. "Seemour works with videos from streaming cameras so users don't actually have to upload [and edit] these videos. They just need to have cameras already installed in their houses, which a lot of them do. And then whenever these cameras have some things going on, Seemour will actually leverage the video streams and understand this information for them." How to use Seemour You can download Seemour today for free from the App Store or visit Seemour.ai for more information. Seemour's visual intelligence can reduce unnecessary camera notifications by as much as 70%. It harnesses the power of large vision-language models and machine learning to summarize multiple on-camera events into a single, easy-to-understand update. This intelligence also allows Seemour to review hours of footage and understand what's happening. In an upcoming update, users will soon be able to ask Seemour questions, saving time and gaining insight. "Imagine a future where you can ask your home what happened today or inform your roommate that you've stepped out to go to the grocery store when they open the fridge," said Xiao. "That future is closer than you think, and we're excited to bring it to you." Seemour is an app that works with the feeds from the security cameras, and the company is actively working on bringing more types of cameras into its system to leverage what is already in homes. The first adopters will be those who already use digital home security cameras. The consumer reaction to tests has been good. "When they first try Seymour, they're very excited to actually see how it fundamentally changes their relationships with the cameras. You can be proactive, because Seemour delivers a contact notification within tens of seconds so you can get pretty much what's going on in real time. You don't even need to watch videos. You can just get every information." The types of cameras can range from outdoor-facing cameras, like front-door cameras, as well as petcams or baby cams inside the house. "I can actually put the camera next to my cat's food bowl. I don't have the time to watch the videos, but now Seemour can watch the videos for me. We can actually to tell them what the cat is doing and also piece together what the cat's day is like." If you're concerned about housemates spying on each other, that's probably a discussion to have before putting in cameras into a place in the first place. And regarding privacy of the content, Seemour said the tech is built with privacy and security at its core. "Any data we store is protected using industry-leading security protocols, ensuring that your information remains private and under your control. We also use industry-leading authentication services and Google Cloud Platform, which is recognized for its industry-leading security and reliability," the company said. "And we don't stop there -- unlike other platforms that quietly absorb user data, Seemour keeps you in control. Your data stays yours, and we never use it to train models without your explicit permission. Our goal isn't just to secure your information -- but to ensure you own it." Key features include: ● Intelligent Video Summaries. Get easy-to-read summaries of significant events captured by your cameras, saving you time and hassle, and never miss a moment. ● Personalized Notifications. Seemour learns and remembers familiar people, allowing you to label them for more personalized notifications. ● Specific Pet Notifications. Teach Seemour the names of all your dogs and/or cats, and Seemour can tell you which pet got into the trash. ● 70% Fewer Alerts. Stay informed without overload. Receive notifications only for the moments that matter, from familiar people and pets to potential intrusions. ● Suspicious Behavior Alerts. Seemour can instantly alert you if it sees unusual or suspicious activity, making your home safer and more secure. ● Delivery Service Announcements. Get instant notifications for who's at your door, whether it's FedEx, Amazon, or the mailman. ● Wildlife Detection. Capture and enjoy the beauty of nature with alerts for wildlife like birds, deer, or bears spotted on your property -- helping you stay aware and connected to the world outside. ● Seamless Integration. See your camera feeds in one platform, with more integrations coming soon. ● Ask Seemour (coming soon). No need to review hours of footage just to know when something happened. Save time and gain insights by asking Seemour questions like, 'Where did I leave my keys?' or, 'When did my daughter leave home today?' Seemour reviews your camera footage, offering answers and highlights using naturally spoken language. ● Invisibility (coming soon). Seemour can remove individuals from video footage to protect their privacy. ● Custom Visual Alerts (coming soon). Get alerts when Seemour sees specific things like Fido digging in your backyard, even if it's never seen that before. Origins Prompt AI is a pioneering visual intelligence research and technology company based in San Francisco that aims to create human-centered, innovative, and useful products for everyone. It is cofounded by Xiao and Seth Park, both of whom hold Ph.Ds in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and Trevor Darrell, a founder and co-leader of Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab, renowned for his significant contributions to the advancement of computer vision and AI research. Darrow has worked with computer vision for a long time. Xiao has worked in the field for nearly a decade. "One of the things that I think really fascinating about this technology is the bigger picture vision that it has for all AI. So now what we're doing is to sort of understand every single video. But the technology can be be much more than just that. We're we're working on the feature to allow people to ask questions like, 'How many times have my candy today?'" Xiao said. The company is working on how to create a summary of day's worth of videos from a petcam or something similar. That's not available yet. Typical videos will be around 30 seconds or longer. One of the goals is to reduce the number of notifications you get in a day from the cameras. With the market for cameras getting commoditized, better quality cameras with better sensors are available now. Many cameras record in 1080p and some with 2K quality, while some have night vision. The AI system can note a given person or pet and you can identify that person for the videos. Gen AI becomes useful in classifying events and describing them. The idea is to find information on your behalf and summarize it or organize it for you. If your cat is on a counter, maybe Seemour could play a pre-recorded message from you to tell the cat to get off the corner. If a package is delivered by mistake, you could refuse it at the door. There are big competitors in the space like Amazon and Apple, which have their own smart hubs for the home. But they haven't entered this space just yet. Xiao said his team understands computer vision well and it is thinking about agentic features for its visual intelligence products in the future. "Something we strive for is our reasoning capacity," Xiao said. "So if three people go into a house and two come out, common sense says that there is still one person there. It's basic reasoning. I think the technology is ready for that." The company has raised $6 million in seed led by prominent investors AIX Ventures and Abstract Ventures, with participation from several renowned angel investors. The team has 11 people.

This new AI smart home app lets your house tell you how its day was -- yes, really

In a move that pushes forward what we think of when we talk about smart homes, Prompt AI has announced Seemour, the first home AI with visual intelligence. This software is capable of connecting to the best home security cameras and other smart home devices in order to describe, understand and act on what it sees in real time. "Imagine a future where you can ask your home what happened today, or inform your roommate that you've stepped out to go to the grocery store when they open the fridge," says Tete Xio, CEO of Prompt AI. Seemour can do those things by using the power of large vision-language models and machine learning to summarize multiple on-camera events into streamlined notifications and updates. The world's first visual intelligence platform, Seemour is a free download in the App Store available today. It connects to home cameras and summarizes moments from video footage, learning the names of family members, friends and even house pets to provide you with details of the day. It not only lets you know that you have a delivery at the front door, it will also tell you which company dropped off the box. The company says that Seemour is a tool that can reduce unnecessary camera notifications by as much as 70%, and that users will soon be able to ask Seemour questions to save time and gain insight into their households. This means you could ask this new AI visual intelligence platform helpful questions like "What time did my daughter leave for soccer practice?" or "Did I leave the coffee pot on?" or "Where are my keys?" Seemour cuts down on the constant stream of notifications by showing important moments but still informs you instantly if it sees unusual or suspicious activity - and it can identify outdoor critters as well, meaning it doubles as a trail camera and you get to identify which animals have been visiting your backyard from birds and squirrels to raccoons or deer. Just like with Google Home or Alexa, you'll likely have to give Seemour access to your various smart home accounts for it to work. We don't have all the details yet but as we're big smart home fans here at Tom's Guide, we plan on downloading Seemour ourselves and putting the app through its paces to see just how well it works.