Let me explain a little bit how things works behind the scene from a technical point of view so that hopefully you can better understand why this is not working and the challenge that we have associated. I will omit completely the fact that Wyze is officially only supported in the USA.
Here are a few grounding facts:
- Wyze operates, at this point, a single cloud based entirely in the USA. We do not have any server located outside the USA. A location where all the services/servers are located are generally referred as a stack.
- Wyze Partners are serving Wyze requests through servers in North America.
- All Wyze devices have in their firmware that they need to talk to the North American stack.
- Alexa is available in multiple countries including, but not limited to, USA, Canada, Japan, UK, France, India…
- Alexa servers for USA, Canada and Japan are in the USA. Servers for UK, France and India are based in in Ireland.
- Alexa requires in order to get the WWA (Work with Alexa) certification that the latency of all operations be within a certain range.
Having those facts established. Let’s see what they translate into…
Based on the location of the Alexa device, each time a user is asking Alexa to do something, the requests is going straight to the servers that are associated with those countries. The devices know exactly which server to use because the firmware is specific to the country.
So first, we would have to deploy a skill for every server location that Alexa is supporting. This is not something that we are supporting for the moment and would need to change our deployments to account for that.
Then the skill, based on the current implementation, would have to make calls directly to the US. The problem is we know that the latency is too high to get the official Works With Alexa certification.
The only solution is for Wyze to duplicate all our servers from the US stacks into the European stacks and any other place where Alexa is available.
But now that we have all the servers duplicated, then we also have to go change all the firmwares and software (mobile app) to be aware of those servers and being able to select automatically the proper server sets based on the location the device is in. We also have to align all our partners to make sure that the traffic for them is also contained within a specific region.
This is overall increasing the complexity of the infrastructure, the complexity of the development, the complexity of the deployments, the complexity of quality control to make sure that we don’t have regional variation.
We can handle complexity, it means slowing down the pace at which we are releasing new features but it also means a significant increase in costs and we can’t justify that cost today to just enable Alexa (or Google Home) for non North American countries.