Your home camera sees your pet every day, but what if it could tell you more?
We’re exploring new ways to make your camera smarter when it comes to pet monitoring, and we’d love to hear your thoughts.
What We’re Exploring
Imagine your camera recognizing your pet by name instead of sending a generic “Pet Detected” notification. For example, you might receive an alert saying:
“Mochi detected in the kitchen.”
Some of the ideas we’re considering include:
Learning to recognize your specific pets by name
Creating automatic photo albums of your pets
Highlighting favorite or memorable moments
Distinguishing your pets from other animals that appear on camera
Providing more personalized pet-related notifications and insights
We’d Love Your Feedback
What do you wish your camera could already do for your pet? Are there any frustrations or gaps you’ve experienced with current pet monitoring features?
How do you feel about your camera learning to recognize your specific pet?
What would make you trust a feature like this? Are there any concerns that would make you choose not to use it?
Do you have any other ideas, wishes, or concerns related to pet monitoring features?
We’re looking for honest feedback, both positive and critical. Your input could help shape what we build next.
I have a Golden Retriever and can chime in. I personally would not benefit from advanced pet monitoring. All of my Wyze cameras view the outside of my house.
I can see where many users could benefit from * Distinguishing your pets from other animals that appear on camera“. There are many videos of raccoons, squirrels, birds and other animals posted on this forum.
Could be useful for some to distinguish between Pets (dogs and cats) and other wildlife.
Tell them apart (i.e., identify a specific individual animal) when it sees them. Two of the creatures that live with me are orange cats, and at a glance it’s easy even for a human to confuse them.
Sometimes finding the right camera mounting location and angle can be a challenge when I want to monitor something specific.
I think that seems like a cool and potentially useful concept if it actually works.
It would have to be reliable and with a very high degree of accuracy. Like I said, with these two guys, even humans frequently mistake one for the other, even after looking at a particular cat for several seconds or longer. I wouldn’t expect a machine to do better without a lot of training, so that seems like the true challenge for something like this. If this kind of feature couldn’t make the distinction, then it would not be very useful to me, and I’d very likely opt out.
Accurate identification is really the main thing for me, and an example that comes to mind for my situation is determining which cat used which litter box at what time. For example, if an irregularity has been identified during routine litter box scooping, I want to know which cat might be experiencing a health issue so that it can be examined and addressed. Also, the veterinarian likes to do routine screening on fecal samples during annual check-ups, so it’s good to know when a specific animal has made a “deposit” so that it can be collected. Wyze Cams (in combination with Plugs to trigger things like Google Home announcements) have been helpful in seeing which animal goes into the litter box room at the time something like that happens for follow-up, but if notifications and announcements could be refined even further to identify a specific creature, then that would be even better.
Need @Antonius to chime in about how he could use this to track all the visitors at his diner: “Weeds and Water” (assuming he had the service).
Would be really funny to have the AI get an instructional background such as:
“Pretend that all wild animals that visit on camera, including raccoons, skunks, possums, cats, etc are all anthropomorphized and visiting a restaurant called “weeds and water”. Assume that the black and white tuxedo cat I have named as “MFP” Is the owner of the restaurant, and that the raccoons that visit are part of a “gang” [Add other backstory clarifications]. When you send me notifications or descriptions of the animals visiting at night, I want you to make up descriptions that go along with a storyline in this narrative making up reasons they were there or creating a story about why they did things they did on camera. You can be very creative. Make it entertaining.” And a bunch of other context.
Then Antonius could post updates to the AI storyline in the form. Lol I would totally come read the updates.
OK, so Antonius might not do that because he’s prejudicely anti AI and subscription but someone else probably would and it would be entertaining to see what story is made up about their pets and regular animal visitors that they identify with names. Now THAT would be fun.
I would be happy with a tag for the type of critter being recorded at Weeds & Water. Since MFP is Lazy he has again delegated operations of the Diner, this time to the Possums since they are present from 8PM to 6AM.
My backyard is a kitty, possum, bunny, duck, racoon, coyotes (once), deer (once), and bird, thoroughfare. I wish I could record the animals but not get constant notifications. Can’t find a way to do both with NBD Filter.
would this potentially be limited to traditional pets? I think if the animal had significant differences this could readily be leaned into with the bird feeder and non traditional outdoor pets.
I dont know if it would have the differences needed to remember all my squirell army I keep around…you know, for science
I think that’s a good point, too, because that and the initial post (“Distinguishing your pets from other animals that appear on camera”) seem to imply that this could expand the recognition capability to satisfy things like Wildlife detection for Cam Plus, which we see bumped from time to time (and which I moved a new Forum user’s first post into earlier today). That could be a popular feature, especially if it could be harnessed by Automations. How many times have we seen comments about deer or other specific critter deterrence?
How about a different color for pets when looking at events. Motion is green but people and pets are both purple. Having a color for each category would be helpful.
I would benefit from this, I also have two orange cats and it would be helpful to know when they make a litterbox “deposit” @Crease or who is getting into what trouble.
I also have outdoor camera and lots of wild critters (coyotes, bobcat, mountain lion, typical bunnies and birds) that would be fun to see what is roaming at night. The floodlight comes on but there’s usually no video recordings. I would think if the light is triggered then there should always be a video trigger.
I don’t have a lot of hope for this to work since I get a lot of false notifications for outdoor activity. Notifications for package, pet, person are actually a car driving by at night with their lights on (40 feet away) or the sun going up or down AND sometimes when someone enters our front patio, which is 15 feet away from the doorbell, we get no notifications. That is the doorbell, so I don’t know if there is a difference between the tech for the doorbell vs the indoor camera but I would prefer that Wyze nail that down (eg more reliable notifications). I apologize for digressing.
When my BatCamPro flagged a squirrel in my bird feeder as a “pet,” I set the alarm to trigger whenever that happened. Watching the squirrels jump was honestly pretty entertaining. The only downside is that there’s no way to limit how long the alarm sounds — a feature that would be incredibly useful. I had to disable the automation since I wasn’t around often enough to silence it.
The funny part is that the squirrels seemed to learn from it. Instead of diving into the feeder, they started sneaking around the sides or settling for the spilled seeds on the ground.
That seems like it’d be something you’d use to monitor .
You may be interested in this Wishlist topic:
As with any Wishlist topic, you can visit that one to click or tap the Vote button above the initial post and share your ideas and use cases in the comments to show your support for the product and feature request/suggestions that are important to you.
I use my Wyze cameras outdoors to monitor an especially loud dog that lives across the street from my home and often comes into my yard. My Wyze v3 can usually identify the movement of the dog but fails to identify barking by a German Shepherd that barks well over 90 dBA as a sound event. It can detect birds and frogs but not this dog that barks at ear splitting volume. I would work to improve this area – barking is a huge problem for this camera.
Ability to label a Likely WOLF, Mountain LION, COYOTE , unknown human with an emergency, immediate override notification would be a game changer. Even if there were 10 false alarms/ real lion, coyote, wolf, unknown human, - totally acceptable. Double, triple the cost,- sign me up.
Enough warning to pull leather, my family’s safety, is worth it.
Ability to differentiate correctly 50 to 75% of the time between a lion, wolf, coyote, skunk, racoon would be game changer, massive value upgrade. A dog was killed by wolf, taken, broad daylight, in back yard 4 days ago by wolf west of Boulder. Camera AI labeled lurking wolf as “pet” .
but someone else probably would and it would be entertaining to see what story is made up about their pets and regular animal visitors that they identify with names. Now THAT would be fun.
