Frustratingly, when I upgraded to the Scout's paid subscription service, it caused a major glitch and for about five days the camera didn't track pets, labeled "no activities found" under the log, and had no historical clips or log available to view. All of the footage was gone, and the AI no longer recognized the cats. When I tried to add pet pictures to help AI reidentify them, it gave me a "Server request error, please try again later" message. Once a firmware update happened, I had to essentially start over—the camera had to relearn my cats, and I lost all previous footage.
One of the main differences between the Petlibro Scout camera and its competitors is the Scout's ability to create AI-written observations of what's going on, which can be very comical. Every time my cat Clover used the litter box, it wrote, “Clover is calmly inside her litter box, taking care of her needs in a private and comfortable moment.” When it recorded my other cat eating, it summarized, “Basil is calmly enjoying a meal with his head lowered toward the food, taking a peaceful moment to nourish himself.”
Petlibro via Molly Higgins Petlibro via Molly Higgins
There's also a built-in Q&A bot named Tobi that answers questions about your pet's behavior and activity. I found this feature pretty much useless; it mostly just told me that Clover was more active than Basil and that Basil was overweight (rude), and told me how many times each cat was active, although this feature is limited since it can only monitor one room. Tobi always ended the message with the disclaimer that all answers were based on AI detection and may be "incomplete or mislabeled."
Privacy Problems
Oftentimes, the activity tracking wouldn't label correctly; I could see in video playback that Basil was in the litter box, but the AI never categorized it. It would also randomly display “no activities found” under each day, even though I knew activities had occurred in the room and the camera was on. The categorize feature seems great in theory, but unless your cat is eating, drinking, and using the litter box in one area, it's not going to be able to catch and correctly categorize it all. In fact, I think the only place it would work is if you had a large room with no objects or walls where all of your cats' goings-on happen. Most people won't have this, so I set it up to monitor their litter box habits and daily lounging—it was away from the water bowl and most of the food, so it rarely captured those types of activities.