Arlo is one of our favorite smart home security systems because it has a
quite generous 7 days of free video storage for its cameras so you can buy
an Arlo system and you don't really have to get locked into a monthly
subscription charge like say Nest and Ring do. Now last year Arlo listed on the
stock market, it is a growing company, smart home is an area that's
going to get bigger and they're expanding their product range and a
couple of the recently launched products here is the Arlo Audio Doorbell and
the are Arlo Chime. Compared to most of the doorbells from the competition this
is only an audio doorbell it doesn't have a camera inside it. I haven't had a
chance to look at it yet so let's just open this up here let's see see what's
going on inside it's about the same size as say the Nest Video Doorbell it's a
little bit smaller than the Ring doorbells. Button in the center
I guess that speaker and mic up top and that is probably an infrared sensor down
the bottom. I have an Arlo system pretty much figured out here on the desk here.
There's the base station and I've got a camera and a couple of lights connected
to it and I'm going to add this into the system. If I find the device type
here and add new device, doorbell is one of the devices, let's click that. okay so
it's telling me to put the batteries in which I've already done so it's just hit
continue on that make sure the LED ring is flashing white which it is and then
it's going to look for it. Now this links into the Arlo base station so it
needs a connection with that. Of course it's going to be no problem here right
across the table. It's an interesting choice by Arlo to go for just an
audio doorbell. That means that if you want to see someone that's on your
doorstep you need to have a camera mounted there anyway. You might have a
camera already but if they'd have gone for a video doorbell it would have meant
that you could have maybe moved that camera to somewhere else on your house
but it also means though that adding a doorbell
is much cheaper because there is no video camera in it so it's a sort of
compromise that Arlo's gone for and interesting they've done it whereas many
of their competitors have video doorbells. So we're curious to see this
it's just updated the firmware on it so it continued let's name it let's call it
just call it front door and now it's asking us right here you can see it's
asking us to select an Arlo camera to pair with the doorbell so I've got a
couple of cameras here I'm actually going to pair it with this one that I've
called back porch and it's asking about the chime as well if you have an
existing doorbell chime. So don't use my chime and then your doorbell is now
active let's finish there and then before we
set it up I'm also going to add the Arlo chime. Now the Chime comes in a much
bigger box. One of the things I noticed though is
that, have a look in there, a lot of this is actually not needed that's that's how
big that is. I think this is I think this is so big because they've made it double
the size of the doorbell box which probably means packing them in in boxes
is easier. I'm not fully on board with the waste in the packaging here but
we'll go for it anyway. I'm going to plug this into an outlet up here and do the
same setup as well, so let's let's go back into add new device, plug it in and
it's already plugged in make sure the white LED is flashing which I can see it
is and then it's going to look for it and add it to my Arlo system now as you
saw when I was setting this up there is an option to have this work with an
existing door chime now that's if you have a wired doorbell and you have
cables from here running back to a transformer with a door chime you can
get it to work but if you don't have door chime I think you gonna have to buy
one of these as well so let's just call it let's also call this front chime
spelling it correctly would help there we go and we've detected the front
doorbell do you want to check pair them yes okay it's now active okay so I have
the doorbell and the chime connected to my auto system I'm looking down at the
doorbell now and it's just sort of sitting there with a blank face if
someone was to approach the motion sensor on it
I think detects motion and then this white ring around the doorbell button
starts pulsing to sort of attract your attention and I guess tell you to a
press here and then we're going to press the doorbell and see what happens so
let's go so that was pretty fast within within less than a second the chime went
and now I'm getting a call on my cell phone if I accept that then up it comes
here and this is as for yourself this is the camera that I paired earlier with
myself with this doorbell so this would be the camera that's pointing at your
front porch where the doorbell is so you can go into having a video call with
someone at the front door I've noticed what it comes on it comes on with the
audio from the camera coming out of your phone but the audio from your phone is
muted when you first start so when you pick up a call and see who's there the
person at the front door is not going to hear you unless you press this button
hello who's this and it's it's coming out of this now hello how are you
the audio quality isn't great and it doesn't seem that loud especially if
it's on a busy street saying there's lots of traffic I'm not sure you're
going to be able to hear this very well and then one of the nice things about
this is that all of those interactions at your front door are stored into your
Arlo account so you and click here and you can replay the
conversation you just have with someone at your front door now what happens if
you don't decide to answer the door so I'm going to press the doorbell again
and like before I'm getting a call on my phone I'm gonna hit hit decline to leave
a message please press the doorbell again so try that hi it's me I'm sorry I
missed you I'll try to come back later
okay a voice message was left on the front door Arlo has told me so if I pull
it up what we actually have here is a 30-second recording so the voice message
is a I guess a fixed length 30 seconds and if I play that that's actually
pretty good audio quality that's a really good audio quality I'm quite
impressed with that so there's one more thing I want to try I'm going to press
the doorbell again and that's to find out what happens if I don't answer the
phone and don't decline so for example if my phone is in my pocket or my bag or
I'm away from it and I don't see that someone's at my front door what actually
happens to the person that's on my doorstep what are they here from the
doorbell is it anything the phone still ringing okay so the phone gave up and
out of the doorbell came a message saying that I could leave a message by
pressing the doorbell again so the last thing I want to show you is how you can
get the doorbell to trigger other devices in your Arlo system you've
already seen that the camera comes on automatically when someone presses the
door but the doorbell also has this motion detector in the front we can use
that to trigger other things too I'm switching to an iPhone because during
the testing of this we discovered a bug in the Android app that only lets the
doorbell trigger one device and it should trigger multiple and that works
in the iOS app so I'm gonna open the Arlo app here and scroll on down to the
front door and go up into
motion settings I've already been playing around with it so I have one
device in here which is a light and what I can do is tell it to turn on the light
when motion is triggered I can also set up motion triggered alerts and I think
it just detected me and switched on the light right there what I can also do is
I can add another device so I can get another light turned on I can get a
camera turned on at doing it this way if you have multiple cameras or lights or
even just a pair a camera and a light near your front door you can have it so
that when the doorbell senses movement they automatically come on and the
cameras start recording that means that you're gonna get recordings ever anyone
that comes up to your front door but doesn't press the doorbell also if
you're in if you're concerned about security or something like that and you
have several of these lights around the outside of your house you can have them
all come on when someone comes up to your front door it's one of the nice
features of the RO system that allows these different devices to trigger other
things so that's a look at the our low audio doorbell I hope this video has
been useful in showing you some of the ways that it can be set up and some of
the ways it can be used