We use video doorbells to check if the postman has brought us more white H&M t-shirts, smart assistants to turn on the bathroom light and speakers that play Backstreet Boys around the house on various speakers as we move around. Our homes, or many homes, have become "smarter" for better or worse.
It also means we've had to navigate even more rumours than usual, as one manufacturer after another claims God knows what about their latest smart product that will revolutionise this and that.
Take babies for example; what does it really mean when your baby cries? Is there a breathing problem? The new Philips Avent Premium Connected baby monitor can not only show you a live video feed of your sleeping baby, but thanks to AI, you can learn what's really going on.
Let me start by saying that I have two boys, aged four and two, who have just started sleeping in the same room, in the same bed. We discovered a long time ago how nice it was to use a camera instead of a traditional baby alarm, because we could usually cut down the number of visits during the evening because when a traditional baby alarm had gone off, and thus required a look, we could really only see that Sigurd had just rolled over, or that Arthur was fast asleep.
We'll get to all that AI stuff, but basically, the Philips Avent Premium Connected is the coolest baby monitor we've ever tried and really mops the floor with the classic mainstays from Neonate. First and foremost, there's the whole concept that the Avent works flawlessly without WIFI, and that it does so throughout the house, and out on the street, and out on the patio. Philips says 400 metres distance on audio, but what kind of witchcraft does it take to get a local video connection to work so smoothly in just 50 metres distance. Yeah, I don't get it. You get the joy of a video feed without having to use WIFI or anything like that. It's huge on that alone.
Secure Connect also uses encrypted channels to secure the signal, and while there's an app that lets you check in on the baby monitor elsewhere, it's still pretty reassuring that you can keep Avent Connected completely offline if you wish. At the same time, while technology can make us cooler, I checked in on my sleeping boys from the app when I was recently hiking in Germany with my friends. It's something special, and when I saw them I was grateful to say the least.
The screen is 1080p via a 5" LCD, which is plenty. There's a thermometer, night light in the camera, timer, Talk Back (for those who want to talk to their child via the camera for whatever reason) and even lullabies. Yes, some of these features are a little too futuristic for my taste, but the core functionality is so rock solid that I'm prepared to unreservedly recommend this one on that basis alone.
Even the battery life on the screen is fantastic, and we've been sitting for something like three evenings (that's constant use from about 7:30pm to 10:30pm every night, so between 9 and 10 hours of consistent use), so we don't really have anything to complain about there either.
However, I don't really have anything nice to say about these so-called AI features. First of all, they're not free, you only get three months of "Zoundream" in the package, but after that it's a subscription, and the idea is that you can interpret the cry and figure out if it's a hungry baby or a baby with a tummy ache. I realise that there are different types of crying, but first of all, it would be downright strange not to go to your baby right away if they cry, but instead sit and ponder, and have Zoundream hand over the analysis beforehand. It's simply too artificial.
Breathing rate is perhaps more useful, as there is a bit more science that can, for example, also tell you if the baby or child is too hot based on breathing rate analyses. But even here it's a bit of a stretch, since you have a built-in thermometer and you, as parents, know when it's too hot or too cold. And yes, we've also had a false alarm on respiration once when Arthur was fine, and then we switched it off. Would you do the same? I'm not going to comment on that.
Even though these intelligent features seem like the same "fluff" we've come to expect from the entire technology industry, Avent Connected is such a home run when it comes to those ordinary everyday things that I would still recommend it for the gold medal. Screen, app, battery life, range, image quality - it's all downright sublime, and it also makes up for these otherwise rather empty promises elsewhere in the marketing material.