Gadgetory

when I moved houses last year had to decide which smart home platform I want to invest in primarily choosing between the two obvious ones Amazon Alexis ecosystem in Google's home I tried to straddle the line between being agnostic but eventually I just had a pick one and I settled on the Google home Mini because 29 bucks sale was a killer deal and give him the way at holiday season for pretty much anything and also being a Google or alphabet entity he was pretty tightly integrated so in the hello doorbell was announced I was pretty pumped but I wasn't overly interested since I already had a ring Pro but the hello adds some new features that I think made it stand far and above the ring so I took the plunge saying hello to the store Bell means saying goodbye to 229 bucks it's not cheap I'm not gonna cover insulation too much the nest app does a really great job of walking you through it took me about 30 ish minutes to do if you want a step-by-step guide we'll link to one down below it's pretty simple though even if you aren't that handy after you install it's gonna integrate to nest app like any other nest product and as someone with seven nest cams it's super nice to have all my cameras heavily integrated into one app from there you get free access to the cams live feed push alerts in three hours recorded history but I would definitely factor in the extra five bucks a month or $50 per year for nests aware subscription it's a bit annoying to have to pay more if you had just shelled out 230 bucks on a doorbell but it's well worth it and with that you're gonna get 24/7 and video recording saved clips ability to set activity zones and five days of video recording they're gonna give you a 30 day free trial though if you want to give it a shot speaking of recording when it record 's the fee it's not going to record your voice for having a two-way conversation with someone just their voice it's a small annoyance but I thought it was worth mentioning so another nice thing is the ability for the hello to say some pre-recorded messages like we're not home please leave the packages and a few more it's really helpful if when I'm in meetings and I can't talk directly what it doesn't have those ability to pre-record my own messages in my voice hopefully that'll come with a future software update the hello has a few neat tricks up its sleeve but perhaps the most useful its ability to recognize faces and announce the names that come to the door and I know that sounds a bit creepy but it's not gonna like pick out of the air you have to manually input someone's name when the doorbell sees a person let's you know and you can select their face and put that name and and in theory when they come to the door to get an alert saying that person is at your door I've had the hello installed for just about two weeks now and it's finally starting to alert me to people despite me and putting their name during the very first few days that I have the hello doorbell I'd wager there's some machine learning happening there but do you know that recognition is not to be instantaneous and it's not going to always work it's that hard time telling faces when someone's wearing a hat or sunglasses on usually just telling me it's somebody new like any video doorbell push alerts are super helpful especially when I'm not at home the ring pro was really fast excited them to me but the hell it looks to be a bit slower gently taking sometimes up to 20 seconds free to get an alert which means that person has already at my door it's not a deal breaker but I do wish they were faster but probably the biggest reason I went with the hello is the ability to mute the doorbell I got two kids usually go to bed like around 7:30 ish and some nights I'm tired my wife's tired and we just ordered dinner and the bell rings it's loud Lucy freaks out usually waking up the kiddos with the hello I can mute the Bell look at my push alerts or even I can schedule quiet time to set the doorbell to turn off every single day it's a really simple feature that's been incredibly convenient for us if you have a Google home or home Mini in your house the speaker can also serve as a chime which is really handy for in a place where you don't typically hear your doorbell the quality is also pretty solid it's a 3 megapixel sensor with its 1600 by 1200 resolution and for a doorbell camera it looks really good so obviously my doorbells outside and my Wi-Fi doesn't work that well out there generally I get 12 up or 12 down and sometimes even half of that but I've had no problem streaming on the highest quality it is nice though doorbells equipped with 802 11ac so at the end of the day it doesn't reinvent the smart doorbell but does get really close to perfecting it I wish the nest aware features were just rolled into the price instead of being a subscription or just ping once per year but it gives you really nice options so hope you guys enjoy be sure to subscribe button down below we've got a really cool video coming out there's been nine years in the making where I give you my top five phones I ever reviewed you're not gonna want to miss that so get hit subscribe button a little bell next to it so you notified of a new videos come into your inbox until next time John Ranger Jack the Buffalo almost knocked that over