Cameras have always been good at one thing: remembering. They record everything, and then they wait for you to go looking. We built Helios to do the opposite. It should do the watching, notice what matters, and tell you before you think to ask.
Over the last quarter, Helios took a big step towards that. It now starts each morning with a short, written brief, for you or for your whole team. It understands that the same person walking past three cameras on four different days is one person, not forty detections. It lets you search your footage the way you'd describe it to a friend. And when you point at a face and say "tell me if they come back", it does exactly that.
Everything below runs on your jupyter Hub, in your home or your business, and it's available in Helios Essentials on the web and in the SecureProtect app. Here's what's new, and why we built it.
The Morning Brief
Yesterday, read back to you.
At 7:30 every morning, Helios writes a short story about yesterday: for a homeowner over coffee, or a duty manager before the shift. Not a list of alerts. A few sentences, written the way a good concierge would tell you.
Monday · 7:30 am · two mornings
A parent packing school lunches reads that yesterday was quieter than a usual Sunday. Across town, a clinic manager reads that the waiting room was busiest between 10 and 11.
What jupyter does. The same Morning Brief for both: a few plain sentences about yesterday, compared with a usual day like it, and whether anything needs you.
7:30 am
It learns what a usual day looks like.
Helios learns the rhythm of your place, so the brief tells you how busy yesterday was compared with a usual day like it, and when the busy moments were. It never buries you in raw counts.
Context
It allows for public holidays.
A quiet Monday means something different on a long weekend. Helios understands the public holidays for your state and region, and it explains a busy or quiet day instead of just reporting it.
Every word is a door
Tap a word, see the moment.
A parcel at the door, a delivery at the loading dock, a returning face, a car in the driveway. In Helios, every moment in the day’s story opens the footage at that exact point.
Wherever you are
On your lock screen and in your inbox.
The brief arrives as a notification from the SecureProtect app, and Helios can email it each morning to the people you choose in Helios Settings, whether that is the family or the whole security team, in a clean, simple layout.
Unique faces
People, not pixels.
Every sighting, from every camera, on every day, is grouped into the person it belongs to.
Thursday · 4:20 pm · who is who
Your kids’ friends come and go all week. At the front desk of a small business, the same courier drops off every afternoon.
What jupyter does. Helios groups every sighting into the person it belongs to, so you see a handful of people instead of hundreds of detections, and name them once.
Most camera systems count detections. Walk past three cameras and you've been "seen" dozens of times. That number looks alarming and means nothing.
Helios now clusters faces into unique people. A face seen at the front door on Monday and at the side gate on Thursday is the same person, and Helios counts them once. You see who came by, who keeps coming back, and who is new, and you can name someone once to have them recognised everywhere from then on.
We also rebuilt how faces look. Helios now finds the sharpest frame of each face from the camera's full-resolution stream, so the faces in People, in search and in your brief are crisp and recognisable, not tiny thumbnails.
Returning faces
The regulars, and the ones who aren't.
Helios highlights faces that return across different days. For a family that's the cleaner, the neighbour and the kids' friends. For a business it's your loyal customers, and the stranger who has walked the car park three evenings in a row.
It's the difference between a camera that saw something and a system that noticed something.
Visual search
Type what you remember.
"Courier with a parcel." "White van at the loading dock." "Someone in a hoodie at night." Helios understands the description and takes you to the moment.
Friday · 6:45 pm · a missing parcel
The tracking says delivered. The porch says otherwise.
What jupyter does. Type courier with a parcel. Helios takes you to the moment, with the matching words highlighted and a picture for every result.
Search that shows its work
Pictures first. Keywords you can click.
Every result now comes with a clear thumbnail, and the words that matched are highlighted so you can see why Helios chose it. Tap a keyword to search for it, or tap the picture to play the clip.
An hour of scrubbing through footage becomes a few seconds and a sentence.
Watch list and alarm
Draw once. Hear first.
The watch list turns a single frame into standing protection: the person who tried your side gate, or a patron a venue has banned.
Saturday · 11:12 pm · a face at the gate
The same stranger tried the side gate last week. Tonight he is back.
What jupyter does. You drew a box around his face once. Now you, or whoever is on shift, hear first, from any camera.
Step one
Draw a box.
Pause any clip or open any event, and draw a box around a face. That's it. No uploads, no forms.
Step two
Helios finds the clearest face.
It pulls the sharpest version of that face from the full-resolution recording, so the watch list is built on a face you can actually recognise.
From then on
You hear first.
If that face appears on any camera, you, or whoever is on shift, get an alert straight away. With a Halo, your place can respond too, with a spoken warning, a strobe or the siren, depending on how you've set it up. Final validation
A place that runs itself
Less to remember. More to trust.
The best security is the kind you forget you have.
Sunday · 5:48 pm · home from the weekend
The car pulls into the driveway with everyone asleep in the back.
What jupyter does. A Keyfob coming home stands the house down as you walk in. No code at the door, no app to open with your arms full.
“Cameras should never make you do the watching. Helios watches, notices and tells you what matters, and one day soon, what to do next.”Temi Akinloye
Included with every Hub
Everything in this update is included with every jupyter Hub, and future updates arrive automatically, with nothing for you to do. Your footage and your faces stay on your Hub, where they've always been.
We're only getting started. Next, Helios will start suggesting the moments worth a second look, and recommending what to do about them. If you'd like to see where this goes for hotels, apartment buildings, commercial property and public spaces, read The end of watching, at scale.