By bizn_fun 
Another smoke alarm company, Kidde, has developed a subscription-based service that charges users in the US $5 (£3.71) per month for access to a fire monitoring service linked to the Ring doorbell app. “Trained agents can request emergency help and alert a customer’s emergency contacts in the event of an alarm,” explains Kidde on its website.
Isis Wu, its president of global residential fire & safety, adds, “In the case of a fire, it’ll send you an alert and it’ll ask you to confirm before you call out the fire department.”
The company also has a smart alarm that avoids alerting users to a low battery during the night, when they are likely to be asleep, since this often results in people disconnecting their alarm and forgetting about it.
Future smoke alarms might use very different tech. Researchers have developed, external an AI-based system that uses machine learning to detect fire in video feeds. The tool can spot fire and smoke in footage from “any camera”, says Prabodh Panindre at New York University – including CCTV, doorbell cameras and phone cameras.
“We monitor the size, shape and growth of the [fire],” he adds, explaining that this helps to avoid false alarms triggered by pictures of fires, or fires on a TV screen, that happen to be in shot.
Panindre and colleagues have even attached the detection system to drones, which could help firefighters faced with pinpointing a blaze in a high-rise building: “These drones can actually go around the building and capture the location of the fire.”
He says the team is now working to commercialise the technology.