Learn about animal detection

Important: To manage the animal detection feature, you need permission from your Google Home admin. To know more about access levels and permissions of people in the home, refer to Manage people and permissions in the Google Home app.

If you turn on animal detection in the Google Home app, you can get "Activity or animal" notifications.This happens when your Google Nest camera or doorbell detects a dog or cat.

Animal detection primarily detects dogs and cats, but you may also get notified about other types of animals. It intentionally tries not to detect birds or insects.

Animal detection is available for newer Nest camera and doorbell models that are set up with the Google Home app.

Turn on animal detection

If your Activity zone is not yet set up:

1. Open the Google Home app .
2. Tap Home   Cameras   your camera.
3. Tap on the player to bring up the overlay.
4. At the top right, tap More   Settings   Settings  Events .
5. Under "Seen events," turn on Animals. To receive animal detection event updates, turn on Notifications.

If your Activity zone is set up:

1. Open the Google Home app .
2. Tap Home   Cameras   your camera.
3. Tap on the player to bring up the overlay.
4. At the top right, tap More   Settings   Settings  Events .
5. Under “Seen events”, select the zone you want to detect animals. Then, turn on Animals.
6. To receive animal detection event updates, turn on Notifications.

Understand how animal detection works

Important: All of this processing is done only on the camera, not in the cloud.

Your Nest Cam processes video data and analyzes it for dogs and cats. When your camera detects an animal event, like your cat jumping on the table, it will record the event and send an "Activity or animal" notification to your phone.

Know about animal detection limitations

We use machine learning to ensure animal notifications are as accurate as possible, but the technology isn't always perfect. Your camera is more likely to accurately detect animals that are larger, nearby, and within clear view of the camera. Your camera or doorbell may misidentify things like:

• Confuse a picture with a real event. For example, a picture of a dog on a t-shirt might trigger an "Activity or animal" event.
• A person could be misidentified as an animal in some situations, like if they're crawling on the ground, or bent over to do housework.
• An animal may be missed.
• Other objects, such as a shadow or bush, may be misidentified as an animal.

As a result, the notification you receive will say "Activity or animal" to let you know that it may not be an animal.

In some cases, your camera or doorbell may correctly identify an animal that's hard for you to find in the recording. This can happen if the animal was far away, hard to detect in the scene, or only visible for a short time.