Apple’s smart home camera service is starting to impress me

Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service is getting in on the Apple Intelligence party to bring more descriptive alerts from your connected cameras and let you search footage using natural language. The Apple Home app is also getting better notifications powered by AI and is finally adding support for energy reporting. These improvements were announced at WWDC last week and will be publicly available this fall. I’ve been playing with some of the features in the developer betas for iOS 27 and tvOS 27 for a few days, and based on my first impressions, Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video is much improved — enough to put it back in contention for me as a home security system. I test a lot of home security cameras and have largely stopped using Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video because it was sometimes unreliable (with cameras disconnecting and clips going missing) and sent too many notifications. While I love that it processes video locally and is end-to-end encrypted, the service has been leapfrogged by competitors like Ring and Google Nest with their higher-resolution cameras and smarter AI-powered alerts . These include text descriptions of recordings, giving you glanceable info of what’s happening at your home, so you don’t have to wait to pull up a video to view it yourself — helping cut down on notification fatigue. It’s a genuinely useful application of AI in the smart home. …