Apple’s smart home camera is winning me over.

Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video is stepping up its game with new AI-driven features that enhance alerts from your connected cameras and allow for natural language searches of your footage. The Apple Home app is also set to improve its notification system and will finally introduce energy reporting capabilities.

These updates were revealed at WWDC last week and are expected to roll out this fall. After testing some of the features in the developer betas for iOS 27 and tvOS 27, I can say that HomeKit Secure Video has made significant strides, making it a contender once again for home security solutions.

I’ve tried numerous home security cameras and had mostly moved away from HomeKit Secure Video due to its occasional unreliability—like cameras disconnecting and clips disappearing—and an overload of notifications. While I appreciate its local video processing and end-to-end encryption, competitors like Ring and Google Nest have outpaced it with higher-resolution cameras and smarter AI alerts that provide text descriptions of recordings. This allows for quick insights into what’s happening at home without needing to watch the video, effectively reducing notification fatigue. It’s a solid application of AI in the smart home space.

With the introduction of Apple Intelligence, HomeKit is finally catching up to its rivals. It will soon support up to 4K video resolution, and since it works with cameras from various manufacturers, it becomes even more appealing—especially for iPhone users.

To access the new features, I downloaded the iOS 27 developer beta on my iPhone 17 Pro Max and the tvOS 27 beta on my Apple TV 4K, which serves as my Home hub. This added a new Apple Intelligence section in the Home settings, where I enabled options for “summarize videos” and “reduce notifications” and selected which cameras would provide summaries.

The summarized videos utilize AI to analyze footage from my HomeKit Secure Video cameras, sending notifications with detailed descriptions of the activity. Instead of a generic “animal detected,” I received alerts like “dog in yard,” and for “person detected,” I got “lawn mowing.” One notification even summarized multiple events from a single camera: “Someone walked into the yard and then went back out to a dog. Aqara G5 changed modes.”

In the app, each clip now features a brief AI-generated description, such as “Someone held a cat in the kitchen” or “Chickens grazing in the yard.” Occasionally, it recognizes individuals (thanks to Face Recognition), but not consistently. While the descriptions are shorter than those from Ring and Google, they still offer useful context. Standard alerts for animal or person detection continue to come through, so my notification load hasn’t decreased yet. However, this is just the first developer beta, so I anticipate further refinements before the official launch.

Searching my camera feeds using natural language was effective—I typed “Show me my cat” and received a plethora of cat videos. However, it struggled to differentiate between my grey and black cats. If I had a HomeKit video doorbell, this feature would be handy for tracking when my son arrives home or when deliveries occur.

I haven’t noticed any reduction in notifications for other Home accessories yet. Apple claims that Apple Intelligence will eventually group related activities from connected devices—like someone arriving home and a door unlocking—into a single notification that updates as events unfold.

Naturally, I encountered several bugs, and the app crashed frequently, but this is typical for a first developer beta. Overall, it feels like a promising start, and Apple Intelligence has already enhanced the functionality of my HomeKit-connected cameras.

One immediate improvement I noticed is that recorded clips and live streams load much faster. I can now view more than two live streams while away from home, which is a welcome upgrade that competitors have offered for some time. The new camera view in the Home app allows me to scroll through a timeline of clips or watch live feeds from all cameras simultaneously. Clips are organized chronologically, providing a real-time view of home activity. When I select a clip, a camera switcher shows footage from other cameras recorded at the same time, which is incredibly useful. Having used various camera app interfaces, I find this one to be among the simplest and most intuitive.

Apple also mentioned that Apple Intelligence will eventually understand connected activities across cameras and present footage from different cameras in a single clip, but I haven’t seen this feature in my testing yet.

Other enhancements include a complete overhaul of the infrastructure for HomeKit Secure Video, improving how clips are captured, stored, and processed. As noted, the cameras load faster and are more stable. An Eve outdoor camera that frequently dropped offline has remained connected since the upgrade. Whether these changes have resolved the missing clip issue will require further testing.

Apple announced support for 2K and 4K HomeKit Secure Video streams, but this feature isn’t available in the current beta. It appears that manufacturers of compatible cameras—like Aqara, Eve, and Eufy—will need to implement the new HomeKit Secure Video specifications introduced at WWDC, so it may take some time before we see this in our homes.

Another long-awaited feature is energy monitoring through Matter. The Home app now includes a power icon in the Energy tab, along with tiles for each connected energy monitoring device. I have a Matter-over-Thread Ikea Grillplats plug that now displays its current, average, and daily usage in kWh. Clicking on the card reveals detailed reporting, showing usage over a year, six months, a month, a week, and a day.

However, there’s currently no option to use energy reporting to trigger automations, and you still can’t set up automations based on events captured by the cameras, like turning on the porch light when a package is detected. This is a feature available in other smart home platforms, which have recently added the ability to create automations based on custom actions.

The smarter cameras and energy reporting are excellent additions to Apple Home, and the upgrades to HomeKit Secure Video have impressed me so far. I’m eager to see how these features evolve in the full release later this year. However, Apple still has some catching up to do regarding features like automations and intelligence, which are essential for transforming a smart home platform from a basic command-and-control system into one that can proactively manage itself.