Petlibro Scout Smart Camera Review: Features vs. Flaws
▼ Summary
– The paid subscription upgrade caused a major glitch, disabling pet tracking, erasing footage, and preventing AI recognition for five days until a firmware update reset the system.
– The camera’s unique AI feature generates comical written observations of pet activities, such as describing a cat using the litter box or eating in a calm, narrative style.
– The built-in Q&A bot Tobi provides limited and often useless insights, mainly noting activity differences between pets and including disclaimers about AI inaccuracies.
– Activity tracking frequently mislabels or fails to categorize events, showing “no activities found” even when pets are active and visible in video playback.
– The categorization feature works poorly in typical homes, as it can only reliably monitor activities in a single, unobstructed area, making it impractical for multi-location pet habits.
For pet owners seeking a smart camera that offers more than just video, the Petlibro Scout Smart Camera presents an intriguing mix of advanced AI features and some significant operational frustrations. This device aims to provide detailed insights into your pet’s daily life, but its performance doesn’t always live up to the promise.
A particularly troublesome issue emerged after subscribing to the paid service. For nearly a week, the camera stopped tracking pet movements entirely, displaying “no activities found” in the activity log while failing to save any historical footage. The AI recognition system completely forgot previously identified cats, and attempts to retrain the system by uploading new pet photos resulted in persistent “Server request error” messages. Following a mandatory firmware update, the entire setup process had to be repeated from scratch, resulting in permanent loss of all previously recorded videos and requiring the AI to relearn household pets from the beginning.
Where the Petlibro Scout distinguishes itself from competitors is through its AI-generated behavioral observations, which often produce amusingly formal descriptions of ordinary pet activities. Whenever one cat used the litter box, the system would note that she was “calmly inside her litter box, taking care of her needs in a private and comfortable moment.” During feeding times, it would report that the other cat was “calmly enjoying a meal with his head lowered toward the food, taking a peaceful moment to nourish himself.”
The camera also includes an integrated question-and-answer feature called Tobi, designed to provide insights about pet behavior patterns. In practical use, this functionality proved largely unhelpful, primarily offering basic comparisons between pet activity levels and occasionally delivering blunt assessments about weight issues. The system’s usefulness is further limited by its single-room monitoring capability, and Tobi consistently concludes each interaction with disclaimers that all responses rely on AI detection and might be “incomplete or mislabeled.”
Significant accuracy problems plagued the activity tracking system, with frequent mislabeling of recorded events. Video playback clearly showed a cat using the litter box, yet the AI consistently failed to categorize this activity correctly. The system would regularly indicate “no activities found” for entire days despite visible pet movement occurring within the camera’s field of view. While the categorization concept appears valuable in theory, its practical implementation requires pets to perform all monitored activities, eating, drinking, and litter box use, within a single, unobstructed area. For most households with typical room layouts and furniture, this ideal setup isn’t feasible. When positioned to monitor litter box habits and resting areas away from food and water stations, the camera captured only a limited portion of daily pet activities, missing many behaviors it was supposedly designed to track.
(Source: Wired)