Did that squirrel in the middle of the street finally convince your dog to escape through the ajar main gate? The dread that follows is a universal experience.
For pet owners (dog parents, specifically), the immediate instinct is to step out and call your pet’s name around the neighborhood. If that doesn’t work, the next best step is to start posting about your missing dog in groups online, complete with physical posters around your neighborhood.
Amazon’s Ring network has been able to aid users in the process of finding their lost dog with ‘Search Party for Dogs,’ a feature that is now expanding to users that don’t own Ring hardware.
For reference, the massive mesh network of outdoor Ring hardware, including Ring cameras and doorbells, has been leveraged to help reunite lost dogs with their families. Search Party for Dogs essentially uses AI to scrub home security footage to see if it could find a match for missing dogs. If and when the camera does find a dog that resembles one reported as missing, it alerts the camera’s owner.
The owner then has the option to manually review the footage and compare it to an image of the missing dog. If they match, the owner can then choose to share the information with the neighbor searching for their pet.
The paywall is gone
Up until now, adding a missing dog alert on the system was reserved for those that had bought into the Ring ecosystem. Starting now, that’s no longer the case.
The e-commerce giant announced the feature’s expansion in a new blog post, indicating that anyone in the US can now start a Search Party in the Ring app to help find their missing dog, “whether they own Ring cameras or not.”
If and when you do start a Search Party via the Ring app, ensure that you edit it if your dog has been found, or renew it if your dog hasn’t been found after a few hours, or start a new one if it expires.
Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighborhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them. Now, pet owners can mobilize the whole community—and communities are empowered to help—to find lost pets more effectively than ever before. That’s why we believe it’s so important to make this feature available to anyone who shares a lost dog post in Neighbors.
