Hate paying for Google Home Premium? This smart home hub does the same things without a subscription

Both Google and Apple now offer home surveillance solutions that use AI to detect faces, pets, and vehicles. These services also summarize key events so you don’t have to sit through an entire day’s video. However, to be able to access these features, you must be subscribed to Google Home Premium or iCloud+, respectively, and that’s a monthly overhead not many people savor. Meanwhile, Reolink, a brand working dedicatedly on home security devices, also claims to offer similar AI-based detection features on its security cameras. While its devices work with Google Home, Reolink also sells a home control hub that lets you manage all your security cameras and store video feeds for days, all locally and without any subscription fee.

At IFA earlier this year, Reolink announced the second generation of its Home Hub, which now also lets you use 2.5-inch SATA hard drives, increasing maximum supported storage to 16TB. It’s somewhat of a NAS, but one that works exclusively for your home security cameras. The Home Hub 2 still retains one of the two microSD card slots from the previous generation for convenient swapping and retrieval. Today, the Reolink Home Hub 2 is going on sale for $199.99.

While local storage is one of the Home Hub 2’s highlights, the brand also claims AI-based detection and identification through the Reolink app. It lets you use natural-language search terms to find specific scenarios, people, vehicles, or pets. The Home Hub 2 connects with up to eight security cameras, connecting all of them over a local network, so you can search through the videos even without the internet. Further, the company says all these videos stored in the Hub 2 are encrypted, so they cannot be accessed without proper permissions.

Apart from these features, the Reolink app also offers a daily summary, with graphs to highlight daily captures of key people or events. The app also lets up to 20 people access the video feeds and the AI-generated summaries, with varying levels of permissions for users.

Finally, Reolink’s Home Hub 2 also supports Google Home and Alexa, letting users view video feeds from their cameras directly onto a smart display from Google, Amazon, or any of the licensed brands.

To buy the Reolink Home Hub 2, you can head over to the official site. Note that the $199.99 purchase does not include any microSD cards or hard drives, which you must buy separately.