Amazon has announced 10 new connected camera products coming to Australia, including 4K, AI-powered surveillance cameras for its premium Ring brand, and sharper, wider options for its lower cost Blink ecosystem.

But as video doorbells have become almost ubiquitous, and connected surveillance cameras inside and outside the home continue to grow in popularity, it’s worth reflecting on what utility they actually provide. Especially since almost all of these products come with a mandatory monthly subscription fee, cloud storage requirements, and (now) promises of new insights thanks to AI processing.

Early connected cameras were more or less only good for peeking into your loungeroom, or out to your backyard or front porch, without actually needing to be there. Handy for checking on your home while you were away, or (if you’re the paranoid type), streaming to some central screen so you can watch over everything like a casino cop from a TV show.

But these days vision from home cameras is generally processed in real time whether you’re watching or not, to inform you of what’s going on. The systems can recognise familiar faces to let you know who’s arrived, facilitate two-way communication so you can politely ask a courier to wait for two minutes while you run home from the shops, and will try to differentiate between a garden party and a small group of thieves jumping over your back fence.

And depending on your set-up and subscription, the footage is usually stored so you can search or scrub back through it if you want to find out what happened to your bike, or who’s been digging up your onions.

This all means that connected cameras can provide your home with the kind of surveillance and analysis that once was only practical for big businesses to run. But it also means the products can be sold as a “peace of mind” provider like insurance or child-tracking. And like a Life360 package that promises to let you know if your teen has been in a car crash, the cameras won’t entirely stop bad things from happening. They’ll just let you rest easy while you’re away, because you’ll know that your phone would tell you if your home was being burgled.

So what has Amazon added to the category with its new devices? Well first and foremost, the company’s director of Ring and Blink in Australia, Mark Fletcher, said that Amazon’s AI and custom hardware means the new Ring cameras will provide higher quality visuals than other surveillance cameras, even of the same resolution.

“We’ve developed what we call Retinal Vision. It’s all around advanced imaging technology,” he said.

“If you think of a Ferrari versus a minivan, and they’re both a v6, they’ve both got the same foundations. But the Ferrari, you tune it, you’ve got great engineers, and you get double the power.”

Retinal Vision is part of the new 4K Ring cameras — the $399 Wired Video Doorbell Pro, $329 Outdoor Camera Pro, $399 Spotlight Camera Pro and $449 Floodlight Camera Pro — which also collect video samples multiple times a day for the first two weeks after being installed, so AI can customise the camera’s settings to best suit its view. There are also 2K models, the $299 Wired Video Doorbell Plus and $99 Indoor Camera Plus, which have a version of Retinal Vision too.

But all this tuning isn’t just so you can see things better through a screen, it’s trying to create a more solid foundation for AI processes to be able to accurately analyse the video.

An update coming soon to the Ring app will go beyond just alerting you to motion, packages or people your cameras see, using generative AI to describe the view directly in a phone notification. For example, a trigger from the camera above your garage may have previously said “motion detected”, but after the update it may say “two people are peering into a white car in the driveway.”

Since the cameras are equipped with calibrated 4K sensors and low light capabilities, there’s no reason they couldn’t read the number plate of any car near your house, or send you quick images of anyone’s face who passes by. There’s no reason you couldn’t essentially have ChatGPT looking out your windows and doors 24 hours a day to report any gossip it saw (or hallucinated).

Amazon hasn’t announced any features like that just yet, but in the US at least it’s leaning on its new cameras for a feature called Search Party which isn’t too far removed. It lets you upload images of your lost dog, which will prompt your neighbours’ cameras to start looking for dogs that match. If there’s a match, the images go to the owner of the camera, who can choose to pass them on to the pet owner. The feature hasn’t been announced for Australia yet.

Fletcher said that Amazon research showed that 68 per cent of Australians used AI every day, and that more than 80 per cent were prepared to invest in smart home security, so bringing the two together made sense.

“With AI, we want to make sure we build great features that are suitable, that our customers ask for,” he said.

“As AI evolves it will get better and better. And the cameras, blending and joining with AI, will only start learning more and more.”

Currently, in addition to buying the cameras, you need to pay $49.95 per year to get basic Ring features such as alerts, or $99.95 if you’d like to access a livestream of your cameras for up to 30 minutes at a time. The premium $299.95 subscription though is required for the AI features, such as the ability to search through your last six months of recordings by entering text prompts, or the upcoming video descriptions.

That means, if you were starting from scratch and wanted to see out of your doorbell and one other location, with the option to have AI describe what it sees or search through footage for you, it could cost you $1000 in the first year (including the cost of buying the devices) and $299.95 per year after that. Fletcher said proactive home-safety alerts were foremost in subscribers’ minds, but that the service offered a lot more too.

“I think that’s why people take up the subscription, and we want to give them that peace of mind. But we also want to make sure we’re continually growing the feature set, making it more rich over time,” he said.

There’s significantly less AI involved in the new Blink cameras, which include a $89 doorbell, the $59 Blink Mini 2K+, a floodlight mount for the existing Outdoor 4 camera, and another mount that can hold two Mini 2K+ cameras and stitch their feeds together into a seamless 180-degree view. You can use Blink devices without a subscription, but it will only notify you of motion; there’s no cloud storage or differentiating between people and other movement. To get that you’ll need to pay $4.95 per month per device, or $15 per month for unlimited devices.

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.