 This camera is unlike any other camera you've ever used before. It's made by Google, and like everything Google makes these days, it uses machine learning to do something pretty special. You see, this camera, which Google calls clips by the way, lets the computer decide when to hit the shutter button. You just turn it on, point it at the world, and the computer figures out if something interesting is happening, and then it takes a picture of it. Now, the craziest thing isn't that it works, because, you know, of course it works. Google's really good at making computers do fancy computer things. No, the craziest thing is that this camera, which recognizes your face and your family's faces, manages to do all of that automatic recording without being the creepiest thing on planet Earth. And that's not just because it's so small and cute. Here's how it works. Like any phone accessory, you turn it on and then you pair it to your phone. And once it's paired, you can just put your phone away if you want to. You twist the lens on the clips to the on position, and a little LED light starts blinking to let you know that it's on and it's looking for something to record. The idea is that you're just going to set it down or clip it to something and let it do its thing. It looks for what Google's algorithms think might be interesting, and then it records a little seven-second clip of that thing. It might be of your kids playing or somebody smiling just right, or, you know, whatever. The camera also learns over time. It has facial recognition so it can recognize your face, your family's faces, and even your pets. Eventually, it learns to take pictures of those people and ignore other people. It's smart enough not to record your hand when you go to pick the thing up, and it's smart enough to ignore really blurry shots because you're just swinging it around too fast. But, you know, if you must, you can hit the shutter button and take a picture manually, like an animal. So, yes, this all sounds very creepy, like super creepy. It sounds like a spy camera that learns your children's faces and records them automatically and sends them to Google kind of creepy. Google says none of that is happening. All of the data is stored only on this little camera, fully encrypted, and can only be transferred to the phone that you've paired it to. And all of the face recognition and pet recognition and whatever only happens on the device, too. Google knows pretty darn well that you might be skeezed out by a camera that recognizes your face and decides when to record it all by itself. So, it made this thing look really obviously like a camera. It isn't meant to be hidden away, and to be clear, it does not have a microphone. A blinking LED is a universal symbol for, you might be being recorded, so Clips has one of those, too. It's also exclusively marketing this thing to parents and people with pets. Here's the pitch. When you whip your phone out, your adorable little monster might stop doing that really cute thing that it does. The other thing that happens when you whip your phone out is that you're looking at the world through a screen and you're probably not going to be in the picture yourself. With Clips, Google says that you do get to be in the picture, and there's going to be a bunch of candid moments that will get captured for you automatically. And the design is really smart, too. It's small and cute and teal, but it's also square so that you can set it anywhere. And it comes with this clip, which you can, you know, clip to stuff. Now, you can clip it to your shirt, but Google says that a bunch of people have been testing that and that it kind of sucks, so you really shouldn't think of this thing as a wearable camera. It's also thin enough to drop in your pocket or your purse, and when you do, Clips is smart enough to realize, hey, I'm in a pocket, and it will stop looking for something that I can take a picture of. I have no idea if anybody's going to be convinced by all of that, but if they are, they're going to get a pretty neat app to go with the camera. It just creates a vertically scrolling list of all the clips that the camera has automatically recorded. Again, they're stored on the camera. They stream over to your phone over Wi-Fi. You just scroll through them and swipe one direction to save the ones you want and swipe the other direction to delete the ones you don't. The app can also be used to give you a live preview, so if you're trying to set up a group shot with a whole mess of people, you can preview it live in the app, and when you hit the shutter button, it records that same seven seconds. You can scrub through any clip and pick out just the frame you want to save, and if you want, you can even trim any of these longer clips to exactly the length that you want. When you're done, you can share it as a GIF or a video file or a plain old image or in Google's new motion photos format. The early prototype version of the app I tried was sometimes crazy fast and super fun to use, and sometimes it was a little bit slow and annoying. I'm really hoping the final version will be more like the fun version that I tried. Oh, yeah, it's a camera, so here are the specs. It has a 130-degree lens on a 12-megapixel camera that's not quite as good as what you'd get on a phone, but it's still pretty nice. It only has 8 gigs of storage, but that seems like it's enough to store a ton of these clips. It was more than I could shoot in a single day. It should last about three hours if you have it on and actively recording stuff, and it should go for a few days on standby. It weighs 43 grams, and again, there is no microphone at all. Remember, it's not creepy. Google says it works with Pixel phones, iPhones, and the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S8, but that more phone support should be coming soon. Maybe the most important spec is the price, $249. To me, that feels like it's at least $50 too expensive, but then again, I don't have kids. To Google, it thinks that all the personal sweet in-between moments that this thing can capture is going to justify the price. I guess we'll see who's right when it goes on sale very soon. So that's clips, but who is this thing for? Well, like I said before, Google says it's for parents and pet parents, because pet parenting is definitely a thing, and you know what? That's true. You're going to be able to get pictures with this little thing that you wouldn't have gotten before because the camera would have kept you from doing it. This just does it automatically. But for me, what's really interesting about this is that it's a new kind of camera. I mean, let's face it, how do you look at pictures? You look at them on your phone, and your phone is capable of doing really interesting things because it has a screen and a processor and all the stuff. And not a lot of cameras are taking advantage of that new way of looking at pictures by making them move and loop and turn into GIFs and the whole shebang. And this camera does that. It's not a GoPro, it's not an action cam, it's not a spy camera or a security camera. It's something, I think, genuinely new. It's an adorable little glimpse at the future of photography.