Nest Hello review

Our Verdict

The Nest Hello has a lot of corking features, including facial recognition and excellent video quality.

For

Great video quality
Google Assistant integration
Flexible scheduling
Facial recognition

Against

Uses a lot of bandwidth to upload video
Requires hardwired connectedness

Tom'south Guide Verdict

The Nest Hello has a lot of cracking features, including facial recognition and excellent video quality.

Pros

+
Neat video quality
+
Google Assistant integration
+
Flexible scheduling
+
Facial recognition

Cons

-
Uses a lot of bandwidth to upload video
-
Requires hardwired connectedness

With video doorbells, video and audio quality thing, merely the real trick is getting the notifications just right. That fashion, you lot're not bombarded past alerts, but you don't miss anything of import, either.

The Nest Hullo ($199) succeeds by continuously recording video, so you never take the frustrating experience of firing up the app just to see video of someone walking away. Facial recognition lets you know who's at the door by name, and it can also distinguish between people and cars, as well as packages. What's more, you can separate the field of vision into multiple zones, which helps you customize the notifications.

We likewise named it the summit doorbell in the Tom's Guide Awards 2021 for Smart Home. Read the residue of our Nest How-do-you-do review to run across why we liked it so much.

Editor's note (Aug. 2021): Nest has a newer video doorbell, which is larger but can run on battery ability, has a more vertical field of view, and offers for gratis three hours of rolling video storage equally well every bit package, person, and animate being detection. Information technology's our new top choice among the best video doorbells. Read our total Nest Doorbell (bombardment) review for more details.

The Nest Hullo has as well been renamed the Nest Doorbell (wired).

Nest Hello: Toll and availability

Nest How-do-you-do specs

Size: iv.6 10 1.7 10 one inch
Video resolution: 1600 ten 1200
Field of view: 160 degrees (diag)
Wireless: 802.11a/b/yard/n/ac (two.4GHz/5GHz)
Conditions resistance: IPX4
Operating temperature: 5 to 104 degrees F
Ability requirements: 16V AC–24V AC, 10VA transformer

The Nest Hello was launched in mid-2018, and currently costs $229 on Google'southward online store; yous tin can occasionally notice it on sale at other retailers.

Nest Hello review: Pattern and installation

The Nest Hi video doorbell is sleek and slim, at four.6 x i.seven x ane inches, and has rounded corners. On its face up is a circular doorbell push lit by a blue band, with the photographic camera higher up it.

(Image credit: Nest)

Its modest size leaves no room for onboard ability, which means the Nest Hullo requires a wired connectedness with 16 to 24 volts of ability. That power requirement can be an issue for older houses — I previously had to get the transformer on my 1946-built bungalow upgraded to get a Band Pro doorbell with the aforementioned power requirements to work.

Past comparison, many of Ring'due south video doorbells — such equally the Ring Video Doorbell and Ring Video Doorbell 3 — tin be either wired or run on bombardment power alone, which makes them easier to install on doors where there was non previously a doorbell.

In add-on, Nest requires you to install a minor module chosen the "chime connector" inside your doorbell'due south chinkle box, located inside the home. Installation isn't difficult, but it is another step.

Nest includes everything yous need to attach the doorbell to your firm, even a huge drill bit in case you accept to drill into stucco siding. If yous don't want to try the installation yourself, the visitor tin connect yous with a Nest Pro. But if your existing doorbell's power supply is up to snuff, the process isn't terribly complicated.

Nest How-do-you-do review: Facial recognition

Unlike most video doorbells, the Nest Hello has facial-recognition engineering science. Once you teach it the names of frequent visitors, the companion app (bachelor for both Android and iOS) will start to proper name them in the push notifications. The Nest Hi gets big points for including a snapshot from the camera with each notification, so yous can get a glimpse of what'southward happening without having to open up the app.

The snapshots are actress handy when facial recognition is wrong — which didn't happen often, to exist fair. First, the app asked me to identify my family and shut friends multiple times from photos the Hullo took. (You can do this for anyone who comes to your door.) I tagged my husband four times, for example, and my son six times. In the Nest app'south Familiar Faces gallery, you can tap Select, cull all the instances of the same person, and tap Merge to combine them. After that, it worked pretty smoothly, but it did misidentify my married man i night equally my son's best friend, a 6-twelvemonth-old African-American boy who wears glasses. (My married man is much taller, a lot older and Caucasian, and does not habiliment spectacles.)

I too wish the Nest Hullo used facial recognition a little improve. There's no way to exclude certain individuals from triggering a notification when they're recognized, for example, and I don't demand the app to tell me that it's me who just arrived home.

As well, to use Familiar Faces, yous have to subscribe to Nest Aware, which starts at $5 per month. That subscription enables additional features, which nosotros'll go into afterward.

Nest How-do-you-do review: Additional features

The Nest Hullo tin can besides notice people, motion and sound. Y'all can't adjust the sensitivity of the sound detection; it's either on or off. I got notifications of birds chirping first thing in the morning, when the neighborhood was otherwise quite tranquillity, but I didn't get notifications throughout the twenty-four hour period almost every car that went by.

For movement, the camera tin tape a prune of all the motion it sees, but the app lets yous cull to be notified only of people. This is a great feature — I certainly don't want a push button notification every time a machine goes by — and information technology worked very well. I never got a notification of a person that wasn't actually a person. And so, you can but open the app to see a timeline of all move events, not just people.

Another handy feature is pre-recorded responses. If you lot tin can't even be bothered to speak to the person at the door, you can tap the Responses push button that appears in the Nest app and cull 1 of three recordings that volition play out of the doorbell'southward speaker. Tap "Tin't come up to the door," for instance, and the speaker will cheerfully chirp, "Hi there! We can't come up to the door right now, but we'll be notified you stopped by." The other two responses ask the person to get out whatever they accept at the door or to wait a minute for you lot to answer.

Nest How-do-you-do: Nest app and web interface

Nest's web app deserves serious props. When you sign in to your business relationship at abode.nest.com, you lot tin view the livestream or old clips, click a microphone button to engage the two-way audio and suit the photographic camera's settings. You can likewise export clips to your reckoner from here, and even create a fourth dimension lapse of multiple clips. Once you take a clip y'all like, you tin share it to Facebook, Twitter, NextDoor or YouTube; download it; or only share a link to view information technology on your Nest account.

You tin export video clips from the Nest app for iOS and Android by selecting one in the timeline and tapping the New Prune button, which uploads the prune to your Nest business relationship online and optionally saves it to your device's photographic camera roll.

Nest How-do-you-do: Subscription costs

A Nest Enlightened subscription is technically optional, and you get a thirty-day trial. But if y'all cull not to subscribe, yous lose the facial-recognition feature, continuous recording and video history, close-ups, customizable activity zones, and the ability to upload clips and create time lapses online. Yous'll still exist able to come across the live view and hash out the two-way speaker, become movement and people alerts (just without familiar faces existence named), see snapshots of events from the by 3 hours and be notified when someone rings the bell.

Nest'due south deject storage plans for its video doorbell and home security cameras start at for $vi per month (or $sixty annually) for 30 days of upshot history from an unlimited number of cameras at 1 location; if y'all upgrade to Nest Enlightened Plus ($12/month, $120 annually), you become 60 days of rolling deject storage, plus 10 days of 24/7 video history. Here'south how Nest's cloud-storage plans compare to Ring, Arlo, Amazon, and Canary.

Nest Hello: Video and audio performance

The Nest Hello's camera has a resolution of 1600 x 1200, and covers 160 degrees of view. It uses a 4:3 attribute ratio, for a squarer picture as opposed to some cameras' 16:nine wide-screen view. The thought is that yous'll exist able to see packages on the basis in front of your door; but my whole chump was out of view, so packages left there ordinarily were, too.

I institute the picture clear and sharp — improve than that of the Ring cameras. The dark vision, which engages automatically, besides beats the Ring's. Nest Hello uses HDR, which helps lighten shadowy areas while non blowing out bright areas. Sometimes the video looks a piddling artificial as a event, but the point is that you go a adept look at everything in the frame, which is but what y'all'd desire from a doorbell photographic camera.

When you're looking at the live view on your smartphone or tablet, you can pan and zoom using your fingers right on the epitome. The lens is fixed, so it's merely digital panning and up to 8x of digital zoom. This is dainty to have only in case you need it, but the default broad view was detailed plenty for me.

Two-way sound lets y'all talk to someone at the doorway with about a second of lag. I got to politely dismiss a door-to-door salesperson from the comfort of my bed — every smart home owner's dream. The speaker on the doorbell itself is loud and clear. The app also lets you disable the camera's microphone (which turns off sound streaming and recording) while however streaming and recording video. Or, you can merely disable audio recording, which withal lets you hear audio over the livestream. This could be handy if you alive on a very loud street and your videos are a racket.

Speaking of options, if you subscribe to Nest Enlightened, you lot might want to adjust the video resolution down a little. Nest Enlightened streams continuous video to Nest'due south servers, and at the superlative resolution of 1600 10 1200, yous could be facing 150GB to 600GB of uploads per month. Nest is up forepart almost this, and suggests reducing the video quality to medium (1152 x 864) or low (512 x 384), or using the schedule feature to plough the photographic camera on and off so that it'southward not uploading continuously.

Google updated the Nest Hello so that users will no longer be able to turn off the doorbell's status light; while you volition be able to dim the low-cal, it will always glow light-green while the camera is on.

Nest Hello: Smart dwelling integration

Because Nest is a division of Google, Nest Hello integrates with the Google Assistant, but it also works with Amazon'due south Alexa vocalisation assistant, besides. So, if you have an Echo Show or some other Alexa-enabled display such as a Burn down Tv set, you tin have it prove a feed from your Nest Hello — helpful if someone rings the doorbell and you can't reply it.

Products with Google Assistant (like the Google Home, Google Home Mini and the Nest Cam IQ with Google Banana) tin allow you know when someone's at the door. Yous can also ask Google Assistant to cast the doorbell'south live video stream to a Chromecast-equipped Television receiver. This even worked with my first-generation Chromecast, although it took some buffering (as all video tends to practice on a showtime-gen Chromecast).

If you've subscribed to Nest Enlightened, you tin can even have your uniform smart speaker announce people by name, assuming they're recognized by the Nest app. I'chiliad a reluctant smart-speaker user, then I establish this weird at first. But it's also the closest my house has come up to the McFly business firm in Back to the Future Function II, welcoming home every family member by name.

The Nest How-do-you-do also works with the Nest 10 Yale smart lock, so that y'all tin lock and unlock your door using your smartphone and assign codes to guests. However, you can't employ your vocalization to control information technology with Alexa or another vox assistant equally you tin can with August'southward and Schlage's smart locks.

However, if you lot've migrated your Nest account to a Google account, you will no longer be able to use many of the clever smart home integrations for which Nest was and so popular.

Nest Hello review: Verdict

The facial-recognition characteristic in the Nest Hello gives this video doorbell a more personal experience than the contest. In improver, its quality HDR video, potent speaker and microphone, and well-fabricated and ofttimes updated Nest app were tops among the other video doorbells we've tested. While yous need a Nest Enlightened subscription (and its recurring cost) to get the most out of information technology, the Nest Hullo is the all-time video doorbell yet.

Credit: Tom's Guide