Home security company SimpliSafe has launched its new live monitoring feature: Active Guard Outdoor Protection. Announced earlier this year, the service is powered by a new outdoor camera that uses on-device and cloud-based AI to alert call center agents of potential threats on your property. The officer then has access to a live view via the camera and can speak to any potential intruder and either deter the threat or call emergency services.

Active Guard has been running in public beta since April of this year and is now available to all SimpliSafe users. It costs $49.99 per month for nightly live monitoring (8 p.m. to 6 a.m.) or $79.99 for 24/7 live monitoring. Both prices include 24/7 professional alarm monitoring from SimpliSafe’s security sensors and its live indoor monitoring service, which launched last year and requires a compatible camera.

Essentially, this new feature allows you to pay someone to monitor your security cameras for you. Instead of having to respond to a “person alert” from a security camera at 2 a.m., SimpliSafe agents can stay up all night for you.

Ring offers a similar service for its cameras, but its Live Guard feature costs $100 per month, which is on top of its standard home alarm monitoring. Starting at $50 per month, Simplisafe’s offering is incredibly affordable for this type of service.

Hooman Shahidi, senior vice president of products at SimpliSafe, explained to The edge how the service works. When the system is armed and the camera detects someone using AI on the device, images are sent to the cloud for confirmation and to match any trusted faces you have uploaded to your SimpliSafe app. Then it is sent to a live agent who can view the data and access the live camera feed to confirm whether it is a potential friend or foe and assess the situation in real time. Shahidi said if it’s a stranger, the officer will engage with the person “in a friendly manner,” and escalate if necessary.

So if it’s a delivery driver, the agent will monitor until they leave and let you know that a package has been delivered and when. But if someone tries to break in or cause damage, they will call the police directly and notify you in real time via app notifications.

Active Guard requires SimpliSafe’s new Outdoor Camera 2, which also launches this week. The camera costs $199.99 and features improved on-device processing compared to the original outdoor camera, as well as improved night vision and better audio.

A battery-powered camera, it comes with a power cable and must be powered constantly to work with Active Guard. Shahidi says customers with the current outdoor camera can get a discount on upgrading to the new one by calling customer service.

The company is particularly excited about the potential of this technology to reduce false alarms and reduce crime in general. “Ninety percent of alarms are false,” said Christian Cerda, CEO of SimpliSafe, in an interview with The edge. “And often you wait more than 10 minutes to get a response. We are trying to help inform first responders so they can prioritize their resources.

Additionally, Cerda sees this technology as helping to move home security from passive to active security, thereby preventing crime instead of trying to stop it once it has started. The company has begun deploying generative AI to identify potential scenarios more quickly. “We add generative AI to help understand situational context, first to provide that information to the agent, and then in the long run to filter out benign situations,” he says. “Rapid engineering uses our known experience of what typically constitutes suspicious behavior. We can apply this to ask the AI ​​to search for this more precisely.

“For example, lawn care services behave a certain way; have specific movements and equipment; a passerby usually moves at a constant speed, even though we know the intruders are scanning the property,” he explains. “This is where we find incredible depth and value in generative AI. ” However, he says they are being “extremely cautious”, that it is still early and that the agent still makes the final decision.

Active Outdoor Guard Protection is now available to all US-based SimpliSafe customers for $49.99. The service and the new camera can be ordered at SimpliSafe.com.