Amazon’s Alexa Can Now Pull Up Recorded Security Camera Footage

Amazon’s Echo Spot and Echo Show come with displays which makes it a useful device for watching videos. In fact both the Echo Spot and Echo Show are ideal devices if you have home security cameras as they can be used to watch live streams, but what about when you want to watch videos that have already been recorded?

Unfortunately that was not possible, at least until now where Amazon has announced a new Cameras Recap API that will allow users to call up recorded footage to be watched on the Echo Spot, Echo Show, or other Amazon devices like the Fire TV or Fire Tablets. “Today, we are excited to announce the addition of the Cameras Recap API to the Smart Home Skill API so that your smart home camera skill can enable customers to view recorded smart home camera video feeds on Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, and Fire Tablets.”

Note that this is an API that developers will need to include in their skills for Alexa, meaning that while the API is available, how quickly developers will take to utilize it remains to be seen. However it seems that cameras made by Ring, ARlo, Cloud Cam, and August already have support so if you are using any of those devices, you should be able to take advantage of this new feature.

Unfortunately at the moment users are only able to pull up the last recorded footage, so if you wanted to pull footage from a specific date or time, you won’t be able to do that yet with Alexa.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Alexa, Amazon, echo, Security