Canary Backer and Pre-Order Update—Jan 13

Hello Canary friends and backers—

Happy new year! January is here and that means… Canary has begun mass shipping! This is a huge milestone. A little more than 500 of you should have received your shipping notification emails so far. That number will grow every day as we continue to send out more devices.

We’re so excited for all of you to receive Canary and start using it! The work that has gone into building Canary has been nothing short of herculean—and that work has been made possible every step of the way thanks to YOUR support. Now we’re excited to transition into a new phase at Canary: constantly improving the product through updates and continued innovation while supporting you—our users—in whatever ways we can. I’m happy to say that we’ve built an amazing in-house support team to answer questions and offer support as needed.

Finished but never final

We spent a lot of time fine-tuning Canary so that it’s an excellent experience right out of the box. The product which we’re shipping now is finished but not final—which means we will continue to update and improve the software. Over the coming months we will be building and adding new features that will enhance the experience.

The core feature set

We’ve focused on making the core feature-set of Canary seamless and reliable. The Canary features you will experience from day 1 include:

• Live-streaming of HD video and audio
• Motion-activated recording
• Push notifications when motion is detected while Canary is in Armed Mode
• Emergency response options
• Siren control
• A timeline of home activity
• The option to record while watching live
• Armed, Disarmed, and Privacy Modes
• Auto Arm/Disarm
• Temperature, Humidity, and Air Quality data (including 24-hour trends)
• The ability to invite multiple users to share access to a location
• Options to save events and leave comments for other location members

All of these features combine to create a completely unique product experience and an entirely new approach to home security.

A crowd-sourced product

A little over 16 months ago, Canary’s crowdfunding campaign became the most successful project on Indiegogo and one of the most successful connected home projects of all time. From that moment forward, Canary turned into more than a product—it became a community. We engineered our system to leverage this community now and into the future.

Over the next couple months our system will be analyzing data from tens of thousands of  Canary devices. This aggregate data will be used to set intelligent baselines for motion detection, safe temperature and air quality ranges, normal indoor humidity, sound levels, and more. These baselines will act as the foundation for Canary’s learning features and intelligent notifications. And as a result, each individual Canary will become smarter and more reliable.

Users can also help teach Canary to recognize and categorize specific types of activity that it detects. At first, the system will analyze this “supervised learning” along with the machine learning and computer vision to help the system at large get smarter. In the future, it will be used to build a unique home profile that will identify patterns, recognize alarming activity, and filter out unwanted notifications over time.

It’s only fitting that, as a crowdfunded product, our community will help us establish a layer of “crowd-sourced intelligence” that will enhance the product experience for everyone.

Questions and answers

When will I get mine?
We’re aiming to ship to all of our US backers this month—the orders will be fulfilled roughly in the order in which they were placed. When your Canary(s) ships you will receive a shipping notification email.

What about international backers?
We will begin shipping to our international backers in a few weeks, at the beginning of February. We’re starting in the US because the majority of our testing has been done here. We want to validate a successful rollout, scaling our systems here in the US, before going full steam ahead internationally.

When will the Android app be available?
The Android app development is slightly behind iOS. We anticipate that our Android app will be live on the Google Play store by the end of this month. We recognize that this means that some of you who are Android users will not be able to set up Canary when you first receive your product. Thank you in advance for your patience. We’ll continue to update you on the progress and readiness of the app.

I moved, can I still update my shipping address?
If you had a change of address and you haven’t let us know yet, please get in touch with us at support@canary.is so we can update your shipping address. But please do so quickly, because shipping has already started! 

What if I have more questions?
Good news: we recently launched our brand new Canary Help Center! It is also accessible through the main navigation on our site. And, of course, if you don’t find the answers you’re looking for feel free to reach out!