I actually said the "integration" was Native, not AI \ Deepstack Functionality...
But agree with what you have said, it comes down to use cases. For instance I am comfortable with BI and direct DeepStack Integration as I use constant record, but as you point out AI
Tools will flag a higher rate (BI will deliberately miss two close events), isn't a problem for me with constant recording, but I would hate to be someone recording on alert only. Need a really long trigger timeout, to ensure you get all the footage.
BI can now send motion alerts to mobiles only when people are detected when away from home, while still flagging other relevant objects, that was my key use as well as daily summaries and third party integrations\web calls, but BI can do all that now.
I also have BI sending "Critical" IOS alerts, when a person is detected between 11pm and 5am. Supporting the iOS critical alert function is new to me.
Other gotchas, you need to select High-Quality Alert Images in BI to have similar quality with AI Tools.
Funny you mention AI Tools, as the cam I still have on AT_Tools is LPR, but using JPEG's created on alert only. Honestly though both have similar detection rates, My cams are 4k, I then run a script to trim (not downscale) the image so it meets the plate analzyer sizing then upload.
Uploading via a script, provides more customization around which API to use. ie: one when away, one when home. But I was actually able to configure the same with BI (ie: still run the same script on alert and then upload)
Perhaps it was just the number of cams, but I did find the dynamic masking consuming a fair amount of CPU, and damn BI switching stills between main and sub played havock with dynamic and masking in general. Get it working and then bam,
BI update and it's unreliable again.
The other strange thing is with AI_Tools I had to run 6 separate GPU instances of DeepStack, where with BI I can just use 1 GPU instance. I think it's because BI is sending the Lower Res Alert Images and not full 4k JPEG's, or just the DeepStack GPU version improved over when I first set it up.
What I am doing though, is finding uses for AI_Tool outside of
BlueIris.