In a move to help alert people to the spread of nearby blazes, Ring is partnering with Watch Duty to let users share their videos on the wildfire tracking app. The nonprofit Watch Duty is partnering with Ring, the Amazon-owned maker of doorbell cameras, to help users share videos of nearby wildfires on Watch Duty's wildfire tracking app. The result is Fire Watch, a new feature being added to Ring's Neighbors app, the stand-alone service that lets users see activity from nearby Ring cameras. If there is a fire in the area, users will be notified and can go into an emergency mode that lets them share videos from their Ring cameras to the feed about that specific fire on Watch Duty's platform . It's not a posting free-for-all; Watch Duty says it will choose which Ring videos to show in Fire Watch, based on relevance.

Amazon's next-gen Alexa+ chatbot is now available in four new Echo devices and a bevy of Ring cameras. The company also debuted three new Kindle Scribe tablets, one with a color screen. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. It got a large language model power-up earlier this year in the form of Alexa+ (a paid upgrade for non-Amazon Prime subscribers), and now, Amazon has fresh hardware to take advantage of the assistant's new capabilities.

Ring is bringing generative AI to its family of home security cameras and video doorbells with a new feature called Video Descriptions. Once this feature is enabled, the motion alerts triggered by Ring cameras will be accompanied by an AI-generated analysis of the motion that triggered the camera to record. In a blog post earlier today, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff described how the push notifications Ring users receive on their smartphones when motion is detected will be enhanced with text descriptions of what that motion was. "This new generative AI feature," Siminoff said, "helps you quickly distinguish between urgent and everyday activity with a quick glance at your phone." Ring will use genereative AI to deliver descriptions of the events its security cameras and video doorbells capture on video.

Jamie Siminoff, who founded Ring and started the company in his garage, is back at Amazon after leaving the company as its CEO in 2023. Siminoff joined Amazon when the e-commerce website acquired Ring in 2018, but he left in 2023 and founded another startup that he sold to lock maker Latch Inc. When he left Amazon two years ago, he said that invention was his true passion. Now, he's taking on the role as the vice president in charge of not just Ring, but also Amazon's smart home camera unit Blink, the company's in-garage delivery operations called Key and the Amazon Sidewalk low-bandwith, long-range shared network. Siminoff is replacing Elizabeth Hamren, who took over his role two years ago.

There's a well-known story among surveillance studies scholars and students of Black innovation: that of Marie Van Brittan Brown, a Black woman from Jamaica, Queens, New York who is now recognized as having invented the home security system in 1966. Brown worked long hours as a nurse and often came home late at night. Her husband also worked "irregular hours," and Brown worried about who might knock on her door if she were home alone at night. Similar versions of Brown's story can be found at the MIT Lemelson Center and all around the internet, including on Wikipedia, the African American history site Blackpast, and the history site Timeline. It's understandable that attention would be paid to Brown's pioneering work as a Black woman inventor whose contribution has rightly been cited in the development of subsequent home security systems and as the origin point for a massive industry.

Consumer drones are notorious for being hard to fly at first, before you learn what you're doing, and the odds are, you will crash it. So how about a drone that flies automatically, in the home as a roaming security camera? One the manufacturer promises won't crash into a ceiling fan or a flower pot, because it has obstacle avoidance technology. And flies back into its cradle when the flight is complete. Jamie Siminoff, the founder of the Amazon Ring subsidiary, insists that it will because there's an app for it.

This year's Consumer Electronics Show is bringing the latest in tech including self-driving suitcases and motorcycles. The Numi toilet from Kohler was impossible to ignore. Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, 2018, the new $8,000 toilet was not just touted to "bring you the finest in personal comfort and cleansing," but it also had voice commands via Alexa. Ready to flush or want to heat up the seat? Just ask Amazon's Alexa personal assistant to do it for you.

A patent application filed by Amazon offers a vision of how doorbell cameras could be equipped with new technology that would allow the devices to gather data and identify people considered to be "suspicious." The application -- revealed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last month and first reported by CNN -- describes how cameras could be used to piece together a composite image of an individual's face, giving homeowners and police the ability to more easily identify someone who has engaged in potential criminal activity. The patent's inventor is identified as Jamie Siminoff, the chief executive of Ring, the home security company that manufactures doorbells that record video and connect to users' smartphones. Amazon acquired Ring in February, thrusting itself into the home surveillance business. The patent application states that home safety is a major concern for homeowners and that the presence of doorbell recording devices can be a "powerful deterrent against would-be burglars."

Amazon's reported $1bn acquisition of video-doorbell maker Ring has closed, giving the company a significant lead over rival Google in the potentially lucrative home security market. The deal, announced in February and closed today, means Amazon now owns a leader in DIY video security systems. Ring makes popular wireless doorbells with cameras and a range of home security cameras, recently launching a wireless home security system with keypads, contact sensors and motion detectors. Ring becomes Amazon's second largest acquisition to date, following its $13.7bn deal last year for Whole Foods Market. The financial details of the deal were not released.

Amazon has acquired video doorbell and home security camera maker Ring in a deal reportedly worth more than $1bn, as it pushes further into the internet of things and in-home-delivery space. The deal values Ring, which makes and sells popular video doorbells in the US, UK and Europe, at between $1.2bn (£86.4m) and $1.8bn, according to reports, making it Amazon's second largest acquisition after the $13.7bn deal last year for Whole Foods Market. Analysts see the Santa Monica, California-based Ring fitting in with Amazon's move into the home security market, driven by a bet on delivering packages inside shoppers' homes to boost sales. "As Amazon moves more aggressively into the grocery delivery space ... we believe smart security devices will be an important factor in driving user adoption," said Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian. Amazon already sells two different camera products: the Echo Look fashion-advice camera and the Amazon Cloud Cam indoor security camera, which forms part of Amazon's Key service that lets uses a smartlock to allow delivery personnel put packages inside a home to avoid theft or, in the case of fresh food, spoiling.