Talking and listening functions are built-in, too, so you can chat with the postman or listen to the pitch of a door-to-door salesman without leaving your chair.

​At the same time, Nest is upgrading its Nest Aware service, the cloud subscription plan available as an optional extra if you buy one of the company's indoor or outdoor cameras. While the free Nest app lets you tune into a camera at any time and get basic motion and sound alerts, Nest Aware (starting at US$10/month) enables you to also look back through several days of recorded footage saved to the cloud, and set up "zones" in the camera's field of view.

If you do decide to subscribe to Nest Aware, you'll be able to take advantage of the new Person Alerts feature. Nest says it uses advanced, cloud-based algorithms (presumably borrowed from parent company Alphabet/Google) to more accurately tell the difference between actual people and everything else (like dogs or a cars).

Eoin Treacy's view

Intelligent home security and monitoring functionality is a big business. Anyone who has ever had a quote for a home security system to be installed will be familiar with how the agent can ramp up costs depending on how much they believe you have available to spend. It was eye opening for me when we had quotes ranging from $300 to $1500 for installation with an embedded commitment to a monthly subscription for monitoring.

In the end we went with, privately held, Frontpoint for our monitoring. It’s a highly rated service provider and came in at a fraction of the cost of either ADT or Time Warner. The evolution of technology means there is no longer any need for wired motion detectors or door sensors. We have Netgear cameras which connect to a dedicated router and run on long life batteries in addition to being smaller, lighter, more energy efficient, mobile ,in full colour HD and much cheaper than legacy products. 

The primary service of a security monitoring system is provided by the call centre which is increasingly being automated. With increasing efficiencies there has been little pressure on companies to offer cut price services at least in part because security is a fear driven sector and consumers conclude it is better to have too much than too little. A testament to the high cash flows security services represent is the fact that Apollo Group purchased ADT earlier this year, Blackstone owns Vivint and Time Warner Cable was taken over by Charter Communications while DirecTV was acquired by AT&T last year.  

Charter Communications (Est P/E 99.27, DY N/A) remains in a reasonably consistent uptrend. 

AT&T (Est P/E 14.96, DY 4.49%) broke out of a lengthy medium-term range in February and while quite overextended relative to the trend mean, a sustained move below it would be required to question medium-term potential for additional upside. 

Netgear (Est P/E 17.72, DY N/A) ranged with a mild downward bias until late last year when its earnings beat analyst estimates by a wide margin. The share broke out to new all-time highs in early June and it continues to extend the move. A sustained move below the trend mean would be required to question medium-term scope for additional upside.

I’ve long had Netgear routers but the inability of its cameras to differentiate between animals and people on its least sensitive setting is a nuisance since it comes with so little video storage. The increasing intelligence of products like Nest represent a major challenge for legacy providers because they can compete on both enhanced service and cost. It may take some time before Google begins to offer security monitoring using an artificial intelligence but it would appear to be inevitable and established businesses will need to either innovate or find some other way to compete.