The latest from ubiquiti - protect 6.0

What’s New:

Ubiquiti is one of the fastest-growing players in the security manufacturing space, highlighted by its license-free business model. This makes the Ubiquiti ecosystem very cost-friendly, and it only gets better from there.

In their latest release, they have implemented some amazing features that puts their software on par with some of the biggest manufacturers in the space. Here is the official release from Ubiquiti if you want to check it out:

Ubiquiti’s UniFi Protect 6.0 annoucement

If you’re looking for a detailed breakdown, I’ll hit some of the highlights in this article. If you are a visual learner, here’s another great video showing you where and how to access some of these features:

Here’s the Highlights:

• Spotlights

  • Spotlights allow you to quickly access any new recordings of a specific type. Whether you want to highlight known faces, vehicles, or any new activity, it’s all readily accessible from the spotlights tab. Think of this as an easy and clean way to filter through your latest notifications. You can also set a duration for each spot light if you don’t want it on indefinitely.

  • AI spotlights require an AI Key. With AI spotlights, you can use plain text to highlight anything within your recordings. Using the example in the above video, he uses “cats” as his spotlight search. Now, anytime a cat is present in the recording, it will be present as a spotlight in the dashboard and readily accessible without any further digging.

• Dwell Time

  • Under highlights from the live view, you can now toggle dwell time to see how long a person, object, or animal has been present.

Toggle dwell/idle time from the highlights option

• Smart Object Search

  • Another feature requiring the AI Key, but is super convenient, is the smart object search. Using this, you can easily find footage of a smart detection object. Simply pause the recording when a smart detection is present, click “AI Summary”, and click on the highlighted detection once the scan is complete. This will bring up past footage of that object. Currently, this is only available for people detections, but expect this feature to be available for vehicles in a near future update.

• Plain-text Search

  • With the AI Key in the “Find Anything” tab, you can use plain text to search through your recordings. This is one of the better features in the update that really puts Ubiquiti on par with other manufacturers in the space. There are many filters to choose from in the Find Anything tab, but in essence, you can simply search through your recordings using plain language. For instance, if you typed “male wearing a black hoodie and sunglasses,” all recordings fitting that description would appear. You can even search vehicles by brand.

• Timeline Updates

  • Grid search

    • You can now highlight certain areas within a recording to further define your search. This is great if you have a known location, like a parked vehicle, package, etc., that you need to locate. See the image below for an example.

  • Object Counting

    • Within the “Playback” tab, you can further filter through different detection types within a specified time range. In addition, you can get an exact count of events by time. This is great in a retail setting to track busy times, see how many window shoppers you have via the loitering detection, etc.

  • Multi-cam Playback

    • If you want to scrub through multiple camera recording streams at once, you can now do so. Albeit with limited functionality compared to the other options highlighted in this article. To do so, simply click “Multi-Camera Playback” in the dashboard (highlighted by the red arrow below).

Grid search feature in UniFi Protect

• System Logs

  • System logs now offer a much more granular look at all events across the platform. So much so, you can see exactly how long a user viewed a stream to the second. You can further sort through the additional logs via “Devices,” “Users,” and “Categories,” such as detections by type, site activity, admin activity, and more. Essentially, nothing will be missed, making this update one step closer to an enterprise-friendly platform.

Summary:

These are some very powerful updates released with UniFi Protect 6.0! I expect additional functionality to be added in future updates to supplement this impressive software release. If you don’t have an AI Key, this might be the catalyst needed to get one!

See the full press release here.