Got tired of the AI Key being $800 (and perpetually out of stock), so I built my own version that runs alongside Protect — curious if this is useful to anyone else before I clean it up for release
The AI Key is expensive and you can never actually buy one anyway, so a few months back I got annoyed enough to build my own version. Runs alongside Protect, doesn't replace it.
What it does right now, on my own setup:
- Natural language search — "person in a blue shirt," "white truck in the driveway," actually returns the right hit
- Weapon/threat/behavior flags — and it looks at multiple frames across a clip, not just one snapshot, so it catches loitering/casing instead of just going "huh, motion happened"
- License plate OCR + vehicle make/model/color/type
- Face recognition against an enrolled gallery
- Audio transcription on clips
- All local. Nothing leaves my network.
Reads from Protect over the API, doesn't touch anything you've already got running.
Right now it's Docker Compose and a pile of env vars — not something I'd hand my mom. Been going back and forth on cleaning it up and putting it out there. Core stuff would stay free, probably gate the heavier pieces (face rec, hooking into cloud LLMs for people without a local AI box) behind something small later to keep it maintained.
Before I burn more weekends on this — is it actually useful to people here, or a "neat, would never set it up" kind of thing? What would actually move the needle for you — easier install, specific detections, notifications (Telegram/Discord are on the list)?
Quick screenshot:
