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Home / News / Ring doorbells can now keep an eye on your deliveries

Ring doorbells can now keep an eye on your deliveries

Make sure your parcels don't go AWOL

As well as alerting you when someone rings your bell, Ring’s smart doorbell range can now send you a couple of more intelligent alerts, called Package Alerts and Custom Event Alerts.

Package Alerts is most interesting, given that most couriers now just dump stuff outside our front doors. The notification will say Package Alert so if you aren’t able to quickly retrieve the goods, you can monitor it in the Ring app. You can tell couriers to leave packages in a particular spot so the camera can keep an eye on them. No more AWOL parcels!

Package Alerts will work with Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 and Ring Video Doorbell (2nd Generation) customers with a Ring Protect Plan straight away, with more devices to presumably follow. 

Did you leave the front door open?

Ring is also introducing Custom Event Alerts which use computer vision and machine learning to differentiate between two different states of the same camera view. As Ring says, the idea is to avoid the “did I shut the door?” after you’ve left the house. It can alert you if a door or gate is open. Initially, this is coming to Ring Spotlight Cam Battery. During setup, you take images of the object in its two states and set them up as a custom alert.

Custom Event Alerts are coming to Spotlight Cam Battery customers with a Ring Protect Plan over the coming months.

Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home