Face recognition

Facial recognition correctly identifies frequent visitors within a couple of seconds of a doorbell press, making it easy to see who is at the door.

Through iCloud Photos integration, the Circle View Doorbell can match visitors to tagged faces and announce their names, and reviewers say it usually recognizes familiar people accurately both during the day and at night.

Multiple reviews find facial recognition useful for tracking kids, family, and caregivers, with generally reliable name tagging when lighting is good, and this test goes further by reporting that familiar faces were identified correctly during trials with no false positives, making the feature genuinely practical rather than a gimmick.

Facial recognition can tag familiar visitors and distinguish unknown faces, powering automations like custom chime messages or lighting scenes, but accuracy still depends on people pausing in view and good lighting, so identification can be less reliable at night or with fast moving visitors.

Across tests the Nest Doorbell Battery’s Familiar Faces feature has proven effective at learning and naming repeat visitors so owners can see exactly who is at the door, but on this model facial recognition is only unlocked with a paid Nest Aware subscription, which means many budget focused buyers may stick with the solid free person and package alerts instead.

With a Nest Aware subscription the familiar face feature can tag visitors and add context to alerts, and earlier testing showed notifications shifting from generic person seen to unfamiliar face seen once the system is trained, but this review also highlights that the option is disabled outright in some jurisdictions where local privacy laws restrict facial recognition, limiting the usefulness of this flagship feature for affected owners.

The Pro 2 does not offer any facial recognition, so it cannot label familiar visitors or send specific alerts about unknown faces and instead relies solely on general person detection notifications.