Smart doorbell lets you know when the postie leaves a package

Clever enough to notify you when someone quietly leaves a parcel on the porch, Google’s Nest Doorbell (Battery) ensures you’ll never miss a delivery during lockdown.

It’s hard to justify spending $329 on a video doorbell when we’re all stuck at home and not supposed to have visitors. Of course, you’ve probably got more deliveries coming to the door than ever. Couriers sometimes rudely drop and run, leaving your precious delivery sitting unguarded on the doorstep.

The Nest Doorbell (Battery) is rechargeable, or can also work on mains power.

But the Nest Doorbell ensures couriers can’t sneak away unseen. It’s a wireless video doorbell with an intercom, which can run on batteries or connect to your existing doorbell wiring. It should only need charging every few months.

When someone presses the button, the doorbell can send a notification to your smartphone. All the Google smart speakers and screens in your home can also spring to life, playing a chime and announcing in unison “there’s someone at the door!“.

The view from the doorbell automatically appears on your smart screens, and you can tap the microphone icon to speak to your visitor. You can also view and speak through your smartphone, even if you’re away from home.

Of course, none of this helps if a courier tries to sneak away without bothering to ring the bell.

The Nest Doorbell’s strength is its ability to recognise specific objects and events. It can notify you when it sees a person, but not be fooled by a stray dog or swaying branch. It’s even smart enough to detect when someone is carrying a parcel, working best with large boxes rather than padded bags.

So as a courier creeps towards your door, you’ll receive a “Person seen” and perhaps “Person with package” notification. If they push the button you’ll get an extra “Doorbell” notification, plus all your smart devices will spring to life. If you don’t make it to the door in time, you can check the video replay to see where they hid your parcel.

You can create zones to reduce false positives, but the doorbell isn’t fooled by passersby in the street. Google will notify you about people, packages, animals and arriving vehicles for free. The $9 per month Nest Aware subscription adds facial recognition, so if the doorbell recognises visitors it announces them by name. It also stores a 30-day event history in the cloud, whereas the free service only stores a few hours.

The $18 per month Nest Aware Plus extends event history to 60 days, plus adds a 24/7 video history for the previous 10 days. The subscription applies to all your Nest Cams.

A smart video doorbell is certainly handy, even during lockdown, but there are a few frustrations which mean it might wear out its welcome.

For starters, it’s not smart enough to realise when you’ve walked out the front door, so you get a smartphone alert whenever you go out to the bins.

More annoyingly, you can’t set your smart speakers and screens to just play a chime if someone rings the doorbell. They insist on also playing an announcement, which could get tiresome on busy days. The alternative is to wire the doorbell to your old door chime.

What’s worse, you can’t control which smart devices announce the doorbell; it’s all or nothing. This soon wears thin if you have smart devices spread throughout the house, even in the bedrooms where children might be in online classes or sleeping. Google really needs to add granular notification controls if it wants more people to welcome a smart video doorbell into their homes.

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Adam Turner is an award-winning Australian technology journalist and co-host of weekly podcast Vertical Hold: Behind The Tech News.Connect via Twitter or email.

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