Google’s Nest Cam IQ is an indoor security camera with extra brains

Nest Cam IQ

£299, store.google.com

Few things in life are more satisfying than getting an alert on your phone and being able to broadcast ‘Stop stealing those biscuits, I can see you’ to a greedy child.

Face recognition is a fairly alarming technology, but somehow it feels OK when it’s inside your own home – and being used to identify the shameless young perpetrator who has climbed up on to a kitchen cabinet to liberate some chocolate digestives.

Google’s Nest Cam IQ is an indoor security camera with extra brains. You get alerts on your phone saying that ‘someone you know’ has walked in front of the camera (or, more alarmingly, someone you don’t know).

You can then speak through a built-in speaker in the camera to instruct your children to put the biscuits down and back away slowly – or tell a burglar that the police are on the way.

The Nest Cam IQ offers lots of neat gimmicks: it records in Ultra HD, so when it spots a face going past, it zooms in on the offender.

Google’s Nest Cam IQ is an indoor security camera with extra brains. You get alerts on your phone saying that ‘someone you know’ has walked in front of the camera (or, more alarmingly, someone you don’t know)

You can also set when you want the camera to be active, so that (for instance) it’s not constantly alerting you that there’s an intruder when you’re working from home.

Google owns Nest, so you can view footage through your TV via Google’s Chromecast devices. It seems excessive just so you can enjoy the expression of terror as you apprehend a young biscuit thief in the act, but there you go.