Now your cameras can talk to each other
Ring is making its smart home devices a little smarter. While Ring’s suite of connected cameras have always worked well with Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and other smart home systems, integration between its own devices has been lacking.
Today, Ring announced Linked Devices as a new feature of its app. This will let you connect all your Ring devices together in the app and have them react to each other. For example, when your video doorbell senses motion or the doorbell is pressed, you can have it tell the Stick Up Cam in your hallway to start recording.
Read this: Getting started with Ring
As Ring’s cameras only record when they sense motion, this is a good security enhancement, as you can now “trigger” all your cameras to record when just one sees movement. It should help address the issue that plagues all security cameras not capable of continuous recording – just seeing the back of someone’s head as they disappear out of frame.
Another new feature rolling out to all Ring users in the coming weeks is an Audio Off option. You can now disable and enable audio streaming and recording on your cameras, although you still can’t turn video recordings on or off for any of RIng’s outdoor cameras.
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By turning on Audio Off you’ll no longer hear audio when the device records a motion event, a live view, or an answered ring. To enable the feature, first select the device in the Ring app, select device settings, click on video settings and uncheck “Audio Streaming and Recording.”
No word yet on how Linked Devices will integrate with the Ring Alarm system. We’ve reached out to Ring for details and will update this story when we know more.
