This $250 camera is smart enough to press the shutter button for you. Is that enough?
The Google Clips.
Would you trust a robot to take candid photos of your family, pets and kids? That's the question Google is posing with the $250 Google Clips. It's a tiny, 2-inch square of a camera with AI smarts: A neural network Google trained to snap 7-second videos whenever it sees something "interesting" occur. (More on how Clips interprets "interesting" a bit later.)
Clips automatically takes 7-second videos of moments you might miss with your phone.
It's a camera you can set down anywhere to automatically capture fleeting moments -- a laugh, a smile, a goofy expression, a cute gesture -- you'd never be in time to capture with your phone. And since you don't always need to whip out your handset, you can live in the moment. Be in the shot with your loved ones, instead of stuck behind the camera.
That's the pitch, anyhow.
But that assumes you trust Google's robot to keep your photos safe and that Google's neural network is smart enough to take shots you'd actually want. And that you have an iPhone, Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy S7 or S8, because those are the only phones it works with right now.
After a week with Clips, I think Google's onto something. But I wouldn't buy one.
In 2013, Google learned the hard way: The world isn't ready to welcome cyborg cameras into their businesses, let alone homes.
Thankfully, the Google Clips looks nothing like the ill-fated Google Glass -- even if you clip it onto a pair of glasses yourself.
With its big eye of a camera and minty-fresh look (the rubber clip looks like a giant Certs, while the camera back is a delightful shade of Mint Chip ice cream), Clips seems more toy than tool. At worst, it's goofy. At best, it's cute!
Cute as a button.
And that's kind of the point, according to Google. The company set out to make it very obvious that the Clips is a camera, with its giant honking lens and always-on-when-it's-on LEDs. (My one-year-old daughter loves to touch both.)
But the most family-friendly feature of the Clips is this: It's about as private a gadget as you can buy in 2018. Your clips are never uploaded, never sent to Google. There's no internet connection whatsoever, in fact -- just a simple Wi-Fi Direct link that pairs the Clips to a single phone at a time.
Not only are your videos encrypted, but the Clips won't let other phones access them, either -- it'll wipe your Clips' internal storage if someone tries to force the issue. The only way to access those videos, according to Google, is to stream them wirelessly to your phone, then decide if you want to manually download them and/or share them to social networks yourself.
So that answers my first question: It's roughly as secure as any dumb point-and-shoot, at least till you upload photos to the web. But can you trust Google Clips to record the moments you'd actually want to capture? I'm less sure about that.
I've got to hand it to Google: Firing up the Clips couldn't be easier. Just set it down or use the optional clippy rubber case to attach it to a potted plant, a kid's toy, a mug, a baby crib slat, you get the picture -- then turn the lens dial to power it on. That's it!
I can do it all with one hand, which, let's face it, is often all that parents can spare.
But after days affixing the Google Clips to practically every baby-height surface and clippable object in my house, I had a hard time finding anywhere I could simply leave it running and expect to get clips worth sharing.
Video quality isn't the issue -- it's good! Google does a remarkable job of keeping images crisp, light on noise and well-exposed, even with challenging lighting conditions like direct sunlight (useful for Patrick Holland's sunbathing cat Stella) or the dark interior of a moving car after sundown. Particularly if you set the Clips to capture at high quality, which you totally should.
If you're too far away from the Clips, it won't work. This is too far.
But since the Clips doesn't pan, tilt or zoom -- it only records what's in front of its 130-degree wide-angle lens -- I'd often get clips of my 1-year-old daughter and 5-year-old Shih Tzu simply walking past the camera, or hanging out at what looked like far, far away on the opposite side of the room.
(Wide-angle lenses tend to do that.)
Google says it's designed to record people and pets roughly 3-8 feet away -- and in practice, that means placing the Clips where you already know the action is about to occur.
It works nicely on a rear-facing stroller, for instance -- though not my front-facing one. Or if you'll be sitting down with the little one for a meal, or storytime, since you can be fairly sure they won't run off. It's not a dealbreaker, but moments do feel a bit less serendipitous when you have to plan them out first.
My biggest problem with the Clips is this: Even when Google's cam has a perfect view of the action, it might miss the moments you'd actually want. I was looking forward to sharing clips of my daughter playing peek-a-boo with my friends at dinner (or hugging our dog), but wound up disappointed to find the Clips hadn't saved either one.
The manual shutter button helped us capture little stunts like this.
Mind you, Google says that Clips isn't designed to replace a smartphone, and might miss moments here or there as it tries to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. But for me, it was a clear sign that Clips isn't nearly as smart as I'd want.
Besides, I'm not confident Clips does a great job filtering out the moments I don't want, either. Out of the 500+ clips we took (the device can hold roughly 1,400 without saving or deleting at all), there were maybe a dozen I truly loved enough to share, and none I'd spend $250 for (this converts to approximately £180 or AU$320).
If a man wearing a Google hat walked up to me and offered footage of my child's first steps for $250, I'd pay him without a second thought. But I wouldn't trust Google Clips with that once-in-a-lifetime moment -- and that's my review in a nutshell.
Trite as it might sound, Google Clips does feel like the future. It's a portent of the world to come: One where cameras smart enough to record and interpret human beings are everywhere. Drones. Security cam. Self-driving cars. Maybe even walking humanoid robots.
It's nice to think that the use cases won't all be creepy and dystopian, that engineers are already working on ways to make them fun and helpful and perhaps even freeing -- so people don't have to always pull out a camera themselves. Maybe Clips will even be that camera, with enough updates. But it feels early right now.
I feel funny saying this, but it feels like the very things that make Clips borderline acceptable to today's society are the things holding it back. Like the camera lens that makes it easily identifiable but causes it to bulge in my pocket, or the always-on LEDs that make my daughter run over and grab it. The fact that it's not always recording and doesn't phone home to Google's powerful servers, which could have helped it pick better photo opportunities. The lack of a microphone, because seriously, Google?
I'm not ready to invite a true Google AI into my home quite yet, and I'm not saying anyone ever should. But I wouldn't be surprised if the next Nest Cam has a built-in neural network to capture 7-second clips for you, or if Google were to suddenly reveal its own tiny Clips drone.
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