Can Apple Home’s AI camera features outsmart Amazon’s and Google’s? I put them to the test

A few years back, I was at a beachside Easter egg hunt, watching my kids dash through sand dunes searching for sweet treats. My phone buzzed in my pocket; I ignored it. A moment later, it buzzed again. I pulled it out, glanced down, and saw a “motion detected” notification from my security camera. “Just my dog in the yard,” I thought, dismissing it. As the colorful eggs piled up in the baskets, my phone kept buzzing. Reluctantly, I pulled it out again and saw several more “motion detected” alerts. I tried to load a video clip, but it just buffered endlessly. AI-powered text descriptions paint the whole scene in a sentence. When I returned home, I found my four pet chickens dead, killed by my small border terrier. Looking back over the camera footage, I saw that they had pushed open their coop door, which I, in a rush to get to the Easter festivities, hadn’t properly secured. If instead of “motion detected,” that first notification had read “small dog chasing a chicken,” I would have raced back home and maybe saved them. Today, that type of notification is possible. With AI-generated text descriptions, a short message describing what…