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A survey of business leaders suggested companies may be measuring against the wrong benchmarks, and that technology adoption was lagging. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros The indoor video monitor is an excellent addition Outstanding battery life Reasonably priced Considering it comes bundled with a display Cons We encountered some playback bugs Display has very low resolution Subscription plan doesn’t add much Our Verdict Pairing a small monitor with this video doorbell is a no-brainer way to get more out of what has become a something of a commodity device. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell Retailer Price $129.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Part of the trouble with video doorbells is that you don’t always have your phone at the ready to see who’s ringing. If you’re standing in the kitchen when the bell rings, but you’ve left your phone in the bedroom, do you rush to your phone to get a peek at who’s there, or do you take a chance and just answer the door? SwitchBot takes aim at this situation by bundling its doorbell with a stand-alone battery-powered display that gives you an extra way to peek at who’s outside. If you’re in on the SwitchBot ecosystem—and even if you’re not—it’s an affordable combo that’s worth a look. Specifications Not to be redundant, but there are two components in the box: the doorbell and the monitor/display. I’ll break down each of them. The SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell can be installed in seconds if you use adhesive, and setup in the SwitchBot app is especially quick. The SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell is a plain-Jane design, available only in silver and vaguely resembling an old cell phone. It measures 4.96 x 3.70 x 1.50 inches (126 x 94 x 38 mm) (HxWxD) and carries an IP65 rating for protection from the elements. According to our IP code guide, that means it’s impervious to particulate matter and that it can withstand jets of water coming from any direction (short of a pressure washer, that is). SwitchBot provides everything you need to set up the Smart Video Doorbell, including angle wedges.Christopher Null/Foundry The doorbell is outfitted with a 2K camera lens with maximum resolution of 2304 x 1296 pixels and a 165-degree field of view. It records video with a 16:9 aspect ratio that promises to capture head-to-toe views of your visitors. There’s also an onboard motion sensor and two small LED spotlights at the top of the device that activate on demand. A speaker and ring button that illuminates when motion is detected, are at the bottom of the doorbell. SwitchBot includes straight and angled mounting brackets in the box. The doorbell is powered by an internal 5,000mAh battery that SwitchBot says can last for up to 19 months on a full charge. That battery can be charged three ways: with a 5V/2A power supply and a USB-C cable plugged into a port on the bottom of the device, trickle-charged with a connection to a standard 24V doorbell transformer, or SwitchBot sells a solar panel as a $50 option that’s designed specifically to keep the doorbell’s battery topped off. (One pet peeve: The doorbell has no indicator to let you know when it’s fully charged. A simple LED would be a nice addition for those who must remove the doorbell to top it up periodically.) The display—a “new-generation super monitor,” per the company—features a 4.3-inch screen with a mere 480 x 272-pixel resolution. A smattering of physical controls let you accept or hang up on video calls, manually check the live view, and playback recent videos. (These buttons have other functions when video is streaming live.) The SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell isn’t what I’d call a fashion-forward smart home device. Christopher Null/Foundry The screen is dark by default unless the doorbell button is pressed, at which point it displays a live view of what’s happening outside. You can set the monitor to be always on, but this simply shows the time (in 24-hour format) and date, and this can’t be adjusted. It’s powered by a standard two-prong electrical plug. Videos can be stored on SwitchBot’s cloud service or on a microSD card that’s slotted into the monitor. Cards up to 512GB is supported, but SwitchBot throws in a 4GB card for you to use out of the box. You can choose from five canned, quick-reply responses (such as “Please leave the package at the door. Leave a message if you’d like to.”) that conflict-averse types can deliver on demand. These responses can be sent by either the app or the monitor. The SwitchBot app is easy enough to use, but it’s odd that it doesn’t provide you with any means to scrub back and forth along a timeline when you’re watching a recorded event.Christopher Null/Foundry Both devices can be wall-mounted via included screws or adhesive mounting options, and the monitor has a kickstand for placement on a tabletop. The display and the doorbell must be within 100 meters (in open air) to communicate with one another; any physical barriers between the two will, of course, quickly reduce that range. And SwitchBot recommends a more realistic range of just 5 to 10 meters. The two devices communicate with each other (and the web, via your router) using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Installation and setup Physical installation will vary based on which components you’re mounting to the wall and how, but even the screw-mounted options require just two screws for each device. Use adhesive and installation can be done in seconds. Setup in the SwitchBot app is especially quick, particularly since it does not require a SwitchBot Hub to connect to Wi-Fi. In fact, the Video Doorbell includes its own version of a hub that allows it to also work with SwitchBot Lock devices, allowing remote control of the lock via the doorbell interface, though it can’t serve as a hub for other SwitchBot gear. To complete setup in the app, the Video Doorbell is served up as a new device once it’s powered up, and a few basic steps complete the bridging to your Wi-Fi network. Using the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell The SwitchBot Video Doorbell works largely as expected. When approaching the doorbell, its ring button gently illuminates. Pressing the button causes the bell to ring (very loudly, by default), the monitor to ring, and a push notification to be sent to your phone. If the device is paired with Alexa (its only third-party support), Echo devices will also announce that the bell has been rung. Oddly, ringing the bell does not cause the monitor to automatically display a video feed from the door. You must press the “play” button on the monitor to start the video, after which it takes a few seconds for the stream to start. The display that comes with the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell is a decided low-res affair. Christopher Null/Foundry It’s also worth noting that the low resolution of the monitor is immediately evident. While color representation looks fine, the grainy quality won’t win any awards and is useful only for a quick check of who’s outside. Both bell rings and motion detection trigger video to begin recording, stored by default to the microSD card on the monitor. Clips are limited to a maximum of 60 seconds, after which they are available in the SwitchBot app for playback for three months. The playback interface is segregated by day, with thumbnails for each recorded event appearing chronologically. A few thumbnails were randomly missing in my testing, and I found recent clips would often fail to load without a force-quit and restarting of the app. The app includes AI-based technology to categorize human motion and tag it as such; this was hit-and-miss in my testing. Paying for cloud-storage subscription unlocks pet and vehicle tagging; plus, unlimited online storage space for 30 days of recordings. This plan costs $4/month or $35/year for a single device, with discounts for additional devices available. A one-month free trial is included with your purchase. The absence of significant distortion was a pleasant surprise.Christopher Null/Foundry I found the motion sensor on the device to be extremely sensitive, and at the highest sensitivity it was flagging activity constantly, day and night, even tagging a random bug flying by as a “human” detected. Dialing the sensitivity down helped a lot toward averting false positives. Video looks good when played back on your phone, particularly during the day, and while the viewing angle is wide, it’s not too terribly distorted. The infrared night vision mode looks fine, though its usable range is limited to about 15 feet, and while the device claims a “color night vision” mode, I found this completely useless; all video recorded at night with this mode active resulted in an image that was almost completely black. One oddity about playback: There is no way to rewind or fast-forward through clips in the app, and even the pause button does not work. If you want to carefully scrub through a clip, you’ll need to download it to your phone for viewing elsewhere. (Fortunately, this is easy to do.) Should you buy the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell? This doorbell lists for $150 and I’ve seen it on sale at Amazon for as little as $120. That’s less than many competing products, none of which come with a video monitor. Since it’s not especially tied to the SwitchBot ecosystem, there’s really nothing that should block any smart home user from picking it up; although if you’re not interested in the monitor, a no-frills doorbell will be the cheaper and more effective way to go. This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best video doorbells. Read...

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Today PCWorld has launched a major update to Smart Answers. When you ask the tool a question, you will now get a longer, more-detailed and better-structured answer that really helps you get the most from our in-depth journalism. What is Smart Answers Smart Answers is a chatbot tool that helps you get more from our content. It’s built using Generative AI and content written by our human editors. The way we interact with content is changing. It wasn’t so long ago you would have sifted through a printed magazine for advice on the latest consumer technology, yet it felt like a revolution when magazines switched to digital and online editions. These days, everything you could ever want to read is on the internet—or just as likely on YouTube or TikTok. The difficulty comes in finding trustworthy, up-to-date information that precisely and immediately answers your question, and most of us tend to rely on search engines and algorithms to figure that out, with varying degrees of success. But faced with a page full of links to visually similar content, you’re still at least one step away from the information you need. Smart Answers is our new reader service that turns content discovery on its head. You control the questions, the answers, and the delivery. It’s like having a PCWorld editor at your beck and call, allowing you to request and receive specific content on demand. So, why wait for the content to find you? PCWorld’s Smart Answers tool is now available in key regions across the globe. Try Smart Answers We’ve worked in partnership with Miso.ai to develop Smart Answers, a GenAI tool (see What is GenAI?) that draws only on Foundry‘s complete catalog of English-language content (written by humans) to answer your natural-language questions. You’ll not only benefit from the expert knowledge of PCWorld editors, but those of Macworld, Tech Advisor and TechHive too, collectively covering the entire consumer technology sphere. Smart Answers is fast and efficient, which means you don’t have to scroll through pages of information to find what you need. You can ask it anything, from what is the best laptop for gaming to which printer should you buy for your home office, or even when is the next CPU family coming out. It’s like having a PCWorld editor at your beck and call… why wait for the content to find you? Ask it a follow-up question, too, or browse the recommended reading for more detail on the topic. Smart Answers is clever enough to work out what you may want to ask next, and it will even show you best pricing for related products and services. Smart Answers has been trained on the type of tech-related questions our readers are likely to ask. Ask it a silly or irrelevant question, and you’ll either get a silly or irrelevant answer, or no answer at all. Our priority is to ensure Smart Answers is able to adequately respond to questions on the topics we do cover. Though Smart Answers is intrinsically linked to our editorial content, our editorial function stands independently. No article published on this site has been created using GenAI. Extensive testing has been conducted by our editors over the two years since we first launched Smart Answers in August 2025, with our feedback used to retrain the model. We wouldn’t be rolling this upgrade out today if we were not confident that the answers it provides are as trustworthy as if they had come direct from our editorial team. This cycle of testing, feedback, and retraining is ongoing and will be important as we continue to add functionality to Smart Answers – and this is just the start of a process that will ultimately put you in charge of your own content experience across Foundry-owned sites. Of course, the real testing comes from you. We’ll be analyzing all search data collected by Smart Answers, and cross-checking the quality of responses, but we’d also love to hear your feedback. You can get in touch with our Director of Content Operations Marie Black or Director of Product and Data Neil Bennett over email. FAQ 1. How does Smart Answers work? Smart Answers is based on a GenAI platform, built by our partner Miso.ai. Unlike ChatGPT, Google Bard and other GenAI tools that source their information from all over the web, Smart Answers has been trained only on content written by Foundry journalists. It responds to queries posed in natural language with a summarized answer and links to related information. 2. What is GenAI? Short for Generative AI, GenAI is a type of artificial intelligence that is able to mimic the neural networks of the human brain and, through machine learning of existing content, generate entirely new content in the form of text, images, video and audio. When given a prompt, such as a piece of natural-language text, the computational power of GenAI allows it to deliver an answer much faster than can the human brain. 3. Can I trust Smart Answers? Yes. Smart Answers provides answers based on articles written by Foundry journalists and does not use data from any external sources, which could be unreliable or subject to copyright concerns. Extensive testing has gone on behind the scenes to help train the model, so we are satisfied that it is able to provide reliable information. We’ve also worked hard with partner Miso.ai to eliminate “hallucinations,” which are misleading or wholly incorrect answers that may be given when the answer is not known or the data required to answer the question is incomplete. If Smart Answers is unable to answer your question, it will tell you so. 4. Is Smart Answers a threat to our editorial team? Absolutely not. Smart Answers cannot exist without the expert content written by Foundry journalists. Its ability to stay useful and relevant is entirely dependent on it being able to learn from their content, and thus it is not the first step in some evil plan to replace our team of editors and cut costs. Smart Answers is a supplementary service for our readers, designed to aid content discovery and enhance the user experience. Though we will make revenue from any ads displayed on the page and earn commission on links to purchase some products and services, Smart Answers also costs us money to develop and run. 5. Is Smart Answers being used to create editorial content on PCWorld? No. Editorial articles feed into Smart Answers, but Smart Answers is not used for the creation of editorial articles. But in the future we may use query data to help us come up with article or FAQ ideas. 6. What data is Smart Answers collecting? We are recording queries submitted via Smart Answers to help us understand the information our readers are interested in. Smart Answers also collects anonymized user data that allows us to better understand the interests and intent of readers visiting Foundry websites. Learn more about Foundry’s Privacy Policy, and Miso.ai’s Privacy Policy. Read...

A partnership between Qualcomm and an AI startup promises lightning-quick AI where it’s really needed: searching through and using your photos and videos as a source of information stored locally on your device. Right now, the partnership is a foundational one, predicated for the future. Memories.ai is launching what it calls its Large Visual Memory Models 2.0 in partnership with Qualcomm, with an eye toward releasing it in 2026. At that point, the two companies will begin pitching the LVMM to customers who develop their own applications for smartphones, headsets, and PCs. Could we see a Samsung Gallery on an Android phone, powered by Memories? Conceptually, that’s the sort of relationship that Memories.ai envisions. People aren’t great about remembering the details of an experience, but a visual can serve as a trigger to unlock the surrounding detail. That’s the metaphor Memories.ai is using, like how the image of a hamburger you ate two weeks ago helps bring back all of the details of what you ate, where it was, and who you ate it with, explained Shawn Shen, the co-founder and chief executive of Memories.Ai. The problem Memories.ai is trying to solve is that machines have learned to be great and recognizing the relationships between words and data, but are much less capable when it comes to imagery. “Ultimately, memories will win,” Shen said. Memories.ai develops two pieces of technology: an encoder and the search infrastructure. Memories isn’t actually powering the image or video that you’d pull out or show your friends or family. Instead, it’s capturing a version of the image or video that’soptimized for the information it contains. That data is then passed to the search infrastructure, so that a query like “my group of friends eating dinner in Korea” would return the proper information. Memories provided a demonstration of their technology below, complete with how videos can be searched and queried using natural language. Photo search and photo query The Memories technology is heading in a couple different directions. For now, the partnership seems aimed at simply providing a better version of on-device photo and video search, basically taking something like Google Photos and developing a superior, private version of it. Some built-in photo-gallery apps tag photos with locations or the people they’ve captured; Memories is essentially creating those tags on the fly. Shen said that the encoding technology could run constantly, culling information gleaned from the real world. It doesn’t sound like that constant recording is a plan for handhelds like Qualcomm’s XR platform for smart glasses or other wearables, however. Instead, that could be a function for a security camera. The second major function of the Memories.ai technology is the ability to “talk to it,” in much the same way Otter.ai’s AI transcription service allows you to ask the service questions about a particular transcript. “When was the last time the pizza got delivered? What suspicious events happened around my home? When did my dog knock the vase over? You can interact with all your personal media files recorded from cameras by just having this natural language chatting,” Shen said. Some of this information could be culled from different sources, of course; you could always find out the last time you went to Japan by looking at your calendar or searching out a trip reservation on your email. Memories.ai believes that you’ll find more context than that within a photo or video. Memories.ai’s natural-language interface. The Qualcomm partnership is the first time that the Memories.ai team has publicly partnered with a chip company for on-device searching. “This partnership will enable AI platforms that are not only responsive but also context-aware, able to retain visual information, recognize patterns over long periods, and perform reliably even at the edge of networks,” Vinesh Sukumar, vice president of product management and head of generative of AI at Qualcomm, said in a statement. “Together, we are speeding up our shared goal to deliver smarter, more intuitive intelligence to real-world applications.” Internally, Qualcomm is “super excited” about the partnership, believing that the Memories.ai technology could be used to search within videos and even eventually edit them, employees said. In addition, the Memories model is small enough that it can be run locally on the device, removing the need to be connected to the cloud and also the lag necessary to go back and forth with the cloud while searching. The partnership isn’t specifically identifying which Qualcomm processors are being targeted, but Shen said that the encoding process is run on the local NPU, and the retrieval is essentially like using the CPU to fetch queries from a database. Qualcomm, of course, launched the Snapdragon X2 Elite PC processor this fall, alongside the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for smartphones and other mobile devices. Eventually, Shen said, Memories plans to design its own application. But for now, Memories and Qualcomm intend to start pitching device makers on building the Memories.ai technology into wearables, phones, and cameras beginning in 2026. Read...

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The highly-complex technology is increasingly being tipped to transform computing. Read...