Jeffrey Witten

People ask me all the time about compelling use cases of AI. Here’s a good one. Millions of dogs go missing in the U.S. every year—and options for finding them are often painfully limited. Our Ring team saw an opportunity to use our community and technology to help, so they built Search Party. When a pet owner posts about a lost dog in the Ring app, nearby participating outdoor Ring cameras in the neighborhood begin looking for potential matches. If yours spots what might be the missing dog, it lets you know. You see the photo alongside footage from your camera, then can choose to share the video with the pet’s owner. The AI is trained on tens of thousands of dog videos so it can recognize different breeds, sizes, fur patterns, body features, unique marks, shape, and color. And privacy stays in your control—you decide each time whether to help. The impact is energizing. Search Party has helped bring home 99 dogs in just 90 days—more than a dog a day since launching three months ago. Ring customer Kylee was blown away by Search Party after her dog Nyx was found by a neighbor’s camera just 15 minutes after slipping through a tiny hole he’d dug under her backyard fence. When a Ring customer and military veteran named Kurt realized his service dog was missing after jumping his fence, he worried he might have lost her for good. He quickly initiated a Search Party in the Ring app asking neighbors to help locate her. Later that day, he got the notification he was hoping for…Lainey was found. Chris, a Ring camera owner, helped reunite another lost dog with its family after getting an app alert that said, “Your camera may have spotted a missing dog,” flagging footage he wouldn't have otherwise noticed. And the list of stories like these keeps growing. Now we’ve expanded this feature so that anyone in the U.S. can start a Search Party through the Ring app, even without a Ring camera (lost pets are one of the most common posts in the Ring Neighbors app—over 1M last year alone). With roughly 90 million dogs in the U.S., think this is gonna matter for a lot of families. Good example of real-world impact, and proud of what the Ring team has built here. aboutamazon.com/news/devices…