Incarnify redefines home security with human-like AI and natural voice commands
We recently had the pleasure of speaking with the brilliant minds behind Incarnify, an innovative home security system that combines contextual AI with a sleek, user-first design. In a market crowded with motion-detecting cameras and endless notifications, Incarnify stands out by doing something radical—it actually understands what’s happening. In this interview, the team shares how they moved beyond recording and alerts to create a device that sees, thinks, and responds like a human—making smart home tech accessible, useful, and truly intelligent.
From Notifications to Understanding
Traditional security cams flood users with clips and alerts. What made you decide to focus on understanding scenes first, and alerting second?
Because if a camera doesn’t understand what it sees, it’s just a recording tool— a passive observer. But that’s not why people install cameras. They don’t want hours of footage. They want answers.
From first principles, the core purpose of a security camera isn’t to capture motion —it’s to help people understand what happened. Is someone at the door a delivery person or a stranger? Did a pet walk by, or did something go wrong? These are questions of meaning, not motion.
That’s why we built Incarnify to prioritize scene understanding first. Our AI interprets events like a human would—filtering out noise, understanding context, and telling you only what actually matters. Instead of flooding you with raw data, it gives you insight. Because in the end, what people really want isn’t alerts—it’s clarity and peace of mind.
Human-Like AI in a Compact Device
The AI Cam uses advanced vision-language models to describe events like a person would. How did you achieve that level of contextual intelligence in such a small home device?
It’s true—vision-language models (VLMs) are incredibly powerful, but also incredibly large. Many of them have billions—even tens of billions—of parameters, and they typically run on massive GPU clusters in the cloud. The challenge was: how do you bring that level of intelligence into a device that sits quietly on a shelf?
Our solution was to rethink the architecture from the ground up. We treat the camera as an intelligent IoT node. The device itself handles real-time sensing, encoding, and smart filtering—everything it can do locally, it does. But the real “thinking”—the high-level reasoning, contextual interpretation, and language generation—happens in the cloud, powered by VLMs.
By tightly integrating both ends, we’ve built a system that feels like magic: a camera that can say, “A stranger is pacing near your garage,” or “Your child just came home from school.” Not because it has superpowers on its own—but because it’s part of a distributed brain. One that sees, understands, and speaks— just like a human would.
Giving Users Control with Natural Language Commands
With AI Command Cards, users can set rules in plain language. Why was this level of personalization important to you?
Because everyone sees the world differently.
Some people want to be alerted when a package arrives. Others care about when their child gets home, or if a stranger is near the garage after dark. What matters to one person might be noise to another. That’s why we didn’t want to hard-code what the camera should care about—we wanted the user to decide.
By letting people set rules in natural language, we’re not just making the camera smarter—we’re making it personal. And because this system is open-ended, it’s not limited to home security. Users have already started using it for pet
monitoring, elder care, garden protection—you name it.
In the end, we built it this way because we believe technology should adapt to people—not the other way around.
Designing for Everyone—Including Seniors
Care Mode shows real attention to accessibility. What inspired the design, and how does AI help make smart home tech more inclusive?
We started by asking a simple question: why are traditional cameras so demanding?
They constantly require your visual attention—you have to look at a screen, watch footage, and interpret what’s happening. But human vision is a limited resource. It takes time, and it doesn’t multitask well. That’s why many people—even young, tech-savvy ones—end up ignoring their cameras altogether.
So we flipped the model. With Care Mode, we convert visual information into audio and text. Instead of needing to see what’s happening, the system can tell you. “Someone is approaching the door.” “A package was just dropped off.” “There’s a person pacing near the garage.” It’s hands-free, eyes-free—and for many users, stress-free.
This shift isn’t just convenient. It’s powerful. It means the camera becomes usable even for those who are visually impaired. It means elderly users don’t need to navigate complex apps. It means people can stay aware of what matters, while doing other things.
In short: everyone deserves to feel connected to their home, no matter their abilities or tech skills. Our job is to make that possible.
From Apple to Incarnify: Building the Future of Embodied AI
Your team includes former Apple and Alibaba engineers. What vision brought you together to create Incarnify, and where do you see this technology going next?
We actually started as college classmates. Over the years, we each took different paths—some into software, some into hardware—and along the way, we met a brilliant designer who brought a completely new perspective. Eventually, we found ourselves circling back to a shared dream: to build technology that doesn’t just compute, but lives in the real world alongside people.
That’s what brought us together to create Incarnify.
We believe in the future of embodied AI—intelligence that’s not stuck in a screen or the cloud, but embedded in everyday objects. It can be a camera, yes, but it could also be anything where hardware and software work together to understand the world and respond in human-like ways.
For us, the camera is just the beginning. It’s a proof of concept that shows what’s possible when AI sees, thinks, and interacts in real time. From here, we want to keep building products that blend sensing, reasoning, and design into tools that actually feel alive—and genuinely useful.
Our goal isn’t just to make smart devices. It’s to make intelligence feel natural, visible, and present in people’s lives.
Thank you to the Incarnify team for revealing the vision behind their next-gen AI camera. With a focus on clarity over clutter, inclusivity over complexity, and intelligence that feels truly alive, Incarnify offers more than just smart surveillance—it delivers peace of mind, reimagined for the real world.
Incarnify: the First AI Home Camera With Human-Like Vision
About Incarnify
The Incarnify team is composed of former Apple, Alibaba, and startup engineers who first connected as classmates with a shared passion for human-centered technology. Now reunited, they’ve launched Incarnify to bring the power of embodied AI into everyday life—starting with a home security system that sees, interprets, and communicates like a real companion. Their mission is simple: to make smart devices feel less like machines, and more like help.
