Smart guardian
for what matters
Connect your cameras to a machine you own: watch live, let AI pick out people and vehicles, replay anything — footage never leaves your home.
- 8
- AI detection types
- 5
- Android · iOS · Web · HA · HomeKit
- 5
- hardware acceleration options
Not an admin page
A workspace
A dock, windows you can drag and stack, widgets on the desktop — use it the way you use a computer
Windows side by side
Live on the left, playback on the right — two things at once, no page switching
Widgets on the desktop
Open it and you already see today's events, disk left, and whether AI is running
Everything in the dock
Live, playback, events, faces, automation — each its own app, one click away
It remembers your layout
Where you put a window, how big, which ones were open — all still there next time
Live view
All at once
Arrange the wall however you like, and let whatever is moving come to you.
Drag tiles to rearrange
Hold a tile and drop it on another to swap the two, however suits you
Birdseye overview
No need to stare at a wall of still pictures — whatever is moving comes to the front on its own.
Point and zoom
Direction, zoom and saved positions in one place; after following someone, the camera returns by itself.
See how many at a glance
A live count of people, vehicles, animals and packages sits in the corner of each view.
AI
Event centre
It recognises what happened, and tells you in one sentence.
Recognises 8 kinds of things
People, vehicles, faces, plates, falls, packages, crying and gestures — all worked out on your own machine, nothing leaves home.
One line tells you what happened
Every event gets a short description, so a glance is enough to decide whether to open it.
Find footage by asking
“Someone rang the doorbell last Wednesday afternoon” — ask like that and it turns up.
Only what you care about
Draw a line to watch comings and goings, ring an area to follow only what matters, and let the rest stay quiet.
Playback
Any moment
Several cameras replayed side by side at the same instant, scrubbing back without day boundaries.
Replay several at once
The same instant from several cameras, side by side — you can see what happened first.
One continuous timeline
No more day-by-day segments; scrub straight back to your earliest footage.
Live and playback in one place
Drag back from the live picture to review, drag forward to return to now.
Fast, slow, zoomed or saved
Speed up, slow down, zoom in, or keep a stretch of time as a file
It gets better
Your own model
Correct it when it is wrong, then let it learn from those corrections — your cameras, your own model, and fewer false alarms over time.
Fix mistakes where you see them
Change a wrong category right on the event — the correction itself is the lesson.
No extra tools
Corrections and extra markings all happen inside SkyView.
Let it learn again
Submit once you have enough; the learning does not run on your machine, so recording and detection carry on.
Use it as soon as it is ready
The improved model comes back to your machine, and one click puts it to work.
Smart actions
Your home responds
An event does not have to stop at a notification — lights can come on, and the doorway can speak.
Start from a template
Common set-ups come ready made; fill in a few blanks and you are done.
Works inside Home Assistant
Camera views, events, camera movement and recordings are all usable directly in Home Assistant.
Works inside Apple Home (HomeKit)
Your cameras show up in the Home app on iPhone, and Siri can take a look for you.
More than a notification
Speak through a camera, switch on lights, start a light-and-sound warning
AI Agent
Natural-language control
Works with Claude Code, OpenClaw, Hermes and other AI agents — just speak: "show me the living room", "pan the garage cam left", "announce 'package at the door' through the porch cam".
Agent-agnostic
Claude Code, OpenClaw, Hermes — pick what you have
The AI can see
The agent grabs a current frame itself and tells you what is in it
A key you can revoke
Issue the agent its own key instead of handing over your account
It can look, and it can act
See the picture, search recordings, read summaries, move the camera, speak through it, add cameras
The less common ones
Rarely found elsewhere — and possibly the one thing you need
Chinese-standard cameras
GB28181 cameras and recorders can be added directly, with nothing in between
Deeper brand support
Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink and TP-Link are covered more completely
Use the camera's own detection
Line crossing and person alerts raised by the camera also feed into SkyView
Fall alerts
An extra safeguard when an older relative lives alone
A baby crying
Picked up by sound, so you need not watch the screen
Gestures
A raised hand can trigger an automation directly
One spare machine is enough
Mini PCs, NAS boxes and low-power boards all work — set it up once and leave it running
Pick what matches your machine
A plain processor
Runs on just about anything
Intel graphics
Let the graphics do the work and free up the processor
An NVIDIA card
For more cameras, or when it needs to be fast
An NVIDIA card, tuned
More out of the same card; the first start takes a few minutes
A low-power board
Frugal enough to leave running around the clock
Choose once when you install; you can change it later at any time.
Natural Language Video Search
Runs entirely on your own machine · no outside AI service · works offline — search your home footage with a sentence
- Pictures are recognised on your own machine and never uploaded to any outside service
- Events get a written summary automatically; search in English or Chinese and get answers in seconds
- No OpenAI, Gemini or Claude account needed, nothing to pay per query, and it still works with the internet down
"Was someone at the front door Wednesday afternoon?"
"When did the red sedan last enter the garage?"
"Did the baby cry last night?"
AI Scene Understanding
Every event gets a plain-language summary — your event list finally reads like English
- Every detected event gets a one-line description, such as “a courier left a parcel to the right of the door”
- Search in English or Chinese — whichever you ask in, it finds the same moment
- Runs entirely on your own machine: no cloud, nothing to pay per query, and nothing leaves the device
SkyView vs Frigate · BlueIris · Shinobi · Scrypted
The self-hosted AI NVR with native mobile apps and on-device VLM — out of the box
| Dimension | SkyView | Frigate | BlueIris | Shinobi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Correct mistakes + retrain the model | Built in · licence included | Frigate+ paid add-on | — | — |
| GB28181 camera / NVR support | Built in | — | — | — |
| Apple Home (HomeKit) | Supported natively | — | — | — |
| Native i18n (EN / ZH / JA) | 4 languages | community | — | community |
| First-party Android / iOS app | both, official | third-party | iOS only | third-party |
| On-device VLM scene understanding | built-in | needs OpenAI | — | — |
| Natural language video search | local · bilingual | Semantic Search beta | — | — |
| Home Assistant + MQTT | native | native | plugin | partial |
| Two-way audio (ONVIF backchannel) | yes | — | yes | — |
Want the full side-by-side breakdown?
Comparison provided for reference only; open-source projects evolve — check each project's official docs for the latest.
Ready to take control of your cameras?
SkyView is live — fully local, self-hosted, licensed per household with unlimited cameras.