What is TattleTale?
The TattleTale device is an artificially-intelligent monitoring system. It functions just like any other security camera, but it has the added benefit of autonomously analyzing its own feed and notifying the user of certain events that occur. The user can prompt the device in natural language to tell it what to look out for, and the device will respond with timely updates concerning that thing.
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Since it can be instructed to monitor anything, it has many use cases. You can use it at home as either an indoor or outdoor security camera. You can use it as a baby or pet monitor. You can use it for office security or theft detection in your store. Or you can use it for routine inspection and other kinds of vision-based evaluation and maintenance tasks.
Features
Autonomous Monitoring
The user can put in a simple prompt such as "I have a package coming today", and the system will remember and watch, waiting for the package to be delivered, at which point it will notify the user. There are not built-in commands, and so it's rather open-ended what the user can request from the device.
Queries Over Time
The device can perform monitoring over long timeframes. That is, it can answer questions involving watching the same camera for a very long time, like "Did anyone come to see me while I was away?" This way, you don't have to watch back hours and hours of footage.
Queries Over Space
The device can perform monitoring over large spaces. That is, it can answer questions that involve looking at many cameras at the same time, such as "Are all the kids in bed?" This way, you don't have to check each of your cameras one-by-one.
General Protection
To be extra helpful, the device has a list of things that it watches out for by default, such as fires. And even when you prompt it as a user, like "Let me know when my package arrives", it will monitor for other relevant things like if that package is stolen.
To be clear, the device can handle many prompts at the same time. So you can tell it to watch out for all sorts of things which will all be monitored simultaneously.
Unique Selling Point
The device simply seeks to democratize the kind of human security monitoring services that already exist. These services cost dozens to hundreds of dollars a month and are not very customizable, as each security agent is busy following the feeds of several customers. This device not only provides similar services at a much lower cost, but does so in a way that the user has much more control over, giving the user the ability to monitor more things than just the conventional security markers such as fires and break-ins.
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​While there are many VLMs (Visual Language Models) that exist today capable of performing tasks like the ones described with at least usable accuracy, these language models are very large, and so far too expensive to run on every single frame of a video stream. The proprietary technique being deployed in the case of TattleTale, however, allows us to perform this AI inference extremely cheaply. So cheaply, in fact, that we provide this service continuously at absolutely no recurrent cost to the user, at a flat fee of just $99.
Award-Winning
The earliest iteration of this project won the Grand Prize at Carnegie Mellon University's TartanHacks 2024, the largest hackathon the university has to offer, and that even features students from other universities all over the US.
