For those who don’t use Reddit, we didn’t want to leave you out of catching up on the latest Wyze news, so I have copied over the summary of Answers from the AMA with their associated Questions for context.
Wyze answered so many questions that this AMA was too long to go in a single post (32000 character limit per post and the Summary Archive itself is 42,676 characters), so it will be split into 2 posts.
The Original Thread where Questions were Asked and Answered can be found here
The Reddit Summary Archive for this event (of which this thread is a copy) may be found here.
Wyze Founders and Product Managers | 10/27/2023
“We are the Wyze Founders and Product Managers - ask us anything” Link
Hosted by:
- u/WyzeDS, Wyze Co-Founder
- u/WyzeCoFounderDave, Wyze Co-Founder
- u/Bitter-Painter-3661, Product Manager
- u/HongfeiN, Product Manager
Part 1 of 2 of AMA - Wyze Founders and Product Managers | 10/27/2023
| Question | Reply |
|---|---|
| Why is Wyze no longer showing up as a Matter Participant/Member? Are you completely giving up on Matter, or postponing your participation to save the yearly fees because you aren’t ready for it yet? Will you be considering matter compatibility on anything in the future? How far in the future? A list of members can be found here: Meet Our Adopters | The Alliance - CSA-IOT and Wyze used to be on that list and recently was removed. | Since cameras are not included in the first release of Matter protocol and our current focus is on camera and security, we are no longer a member. We are very interested and are watching for any news related to Matter, but we are not actively working on it. -u/WyzeDS |
| Full dark mode when? | With our limited resources, we want to first support Dark Mode for the pages most commonly visited by customers to cover most of the customers’ needs. We’re going to keep doing batches of these updates but it’s going to take a long time to work through the app. -u/WyzeDS |
Will you guys ever consider better integration with Home Assistant now that EVERYONE else but you (all your major competitors) officially supports it? Nearly EVERY ONE of your main competitors has official Home Assistant integrations already (even smaller competitors like Eufy, Reolink, Tuya, YoLink, Xiaomi/Aqara, Amcrest, Ubiquiti UniFi, Yi, & TONS MORE, Plus ALL the big ones like Blink, Ring, Nest, etc). It’s painful that out of all the Camera and smart home choices out there, only my favorite company, Wyze, doesn’t support Home Assistant when nearly every other competitor of yours does. Again, why? Also, if you aren’t going to do Matter soon, as it seems (you’re no longer showing up as a member/participant like you used to), why not AT LEAST make a Home Assistant integration like every other competitor company has done already? That would at least keep you in line with the industry standard (since EVERYONE ELSE has it already). Don’t take my word for it, look for yourself: Integrations - Home Assistant Basically, only Wyze isn’t included as an official integration in there. If EVERY other company but you supports it, it might be time to ask yourselves why and help us understand why. Will you please consider it finally? Please don’t keep falling farther behind everyone in this area.  |
Thank you for bringing up this question. Our understanding is that Home Assistant has various integrations with different brands. For example, Eufy’s integration is on Light and Switch, but not cameras. Meanwhile, Blink can see images and events. Because there are many different integration capabilities and levels of integration, the high level term of “being integrated with Home Assistant” doesn’t mean much, unless the specific product and specific feature you wanted is being integrated. We are happy to look into it more, but we believe our resources can be better used at this stage to improve our own features and reliability. That will be beneficial for most of our customers. -u/WyzeDS |
| What are the chances of getting a camera with a higher FPS rate or better Bitrate with less compression? If you’re concerned about cloud storage costs, maybe do something to where we agree to fewer days of storage or only AI events if we do that. Or maybe you can make a camera where the cloud uploads are still at a lower bitrate/FPS, but our liveview, locally, can be at a better rate, as can the SD card recordings. Then it won’t affect your cloud business model costs so much (ie: cloud for the detections, and SD card/liveview in higher quality when needed). Or some other toggle or something. Maybe it normally has a lower bitrate/FPS when we’re not actively viewing it and it’s just going to the cloud, but if we load it up in the app we can toggle it to a higher FPS and Bitrate while actively using it (and since we’re live streaming locally/P2P it doesn’t affect you anyway), which auto-toggles back off when close the app. Any of those would be solutions to make the camera more awesome without affecting your costs too much. | Thank you for the question. Technically, this can be done. We are more concerned about Wi-Fi bandwidth and connection as well as other issues with higher FPS or bitrate. The current FPS and bitrate is what we believe to be the best balance for most customers. -u/WyzeDS |
| *Mesh Router Pro USB port to save camera events locally - Is it still coming? I’m surprised you haven’t yet added the NAS feature to the Router Pro USB port as was stated when the routers launched that it would be available. Lots of people got the Mesh Pros specifically because you said this feature was coming “in the coming months”. Since it is 100% just about cameras and storing camera footage, it also seems directly related to the focus on “The Year of the Camera.” What is the delay for? Is it still on the roadmap? Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC3zLPGfz8Q&t=351s * | We’ve encountered some challenges with engineering resources related to the NAS project and this has resulted in delays. We’re actively working to determine when and if we can provide this feature. If you’ve made a purchase of Wyze Mesh Router Pro primarily for this feature, we encourage you to get in touch with our Support Team. Your satisfaction is important to us and we’re here to assist you. Support.wyze.com -u/WyzeDS |
| Dashcam when? I mean, it is “The Year of the Camera” as you said, and we already have lots of choices of every other type of camera, but still no Dashcam. What’s the holdup? | We hear this quite often. I have personally tried some dashcams offered on Amazon. They aren’t expensive and the performance isn’t bad. I don’t see how we (as Wyze) can disrupt that market. It doesn’t make sense for us to create a dashcam that is similar to others just to have a Wyze branded one. If I missed any good reasons why we should develop one, I’m all ears. -u/WyzeDS |
| Are you still open to making a sequel to your Robot Vacuum, or is that unlikely at this point? It would be nice if you leveraged your AI strengths to make a Robot vacuum that could detect and avoid objects and liquids below the Lidar level so we don’t always have to “pre-clean” before running the WRV (liquids, pet waste, cords, other small things that might jam it up, etc), currently making true schedules difficult to implement. Lots of other companies are using a camera AI to detect and avoid low-to-the-ground objects that should be avoided for vacuuming/mopping. You already have Advanced AI, why not do one yourself? Also, mopping would be a nice option for a robovac v2 | Making a low-cost robot vacuum is a pretty tough business that I would say we haven’t quite solved yet. We have actually moved almost all of our vacuum business to Walmart now. They have been a great partner and sales have been good. This has allowed us to keep vacuums in our product selection even as we focused more on cameras in 2023. While we have been discussing upgraded vacuums with Walmart, I don’t expect us to launch anything in the short term. If we have a lot of customer requests or if Walmart pushes us to give them an upgrade, then we will do it. But most customers have asked us to focus on cameras right now, so that is still our main focus. You are spot on with the next challenge to solve for the vacuum, though. In the long term, we definitely think that Home Robotics with AI to do daily chores will be a core piece of the smart home and we intend to compete in that space. We are just kicking off a project for this that probably won’t be released for 3-5 years. -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| Now that “The Year of the Camera” is ending, can we expect you to pick back up on abandoned non-camera projects for 2024? It’s understandable if Cameras remain a priority, but it will be disappointing to many of us if we have to start looking at other ecosystems to expand our Smart Home now. For example, will you be completing the non-neutral-wire-switch you previously said you were working on? What about the “Universal Chime” Steve mentioned in his 2022 AMA? Smart Button? -Those are all things previously being worked on that got suspended, but there are many other things you could add. Any hints? Will you at least be offering some non-camera things this next year? What’s in store for 2024? | We mostly expect the Year of the Camera to extend to 2024 as well. We have some unique cameras coming next year. But if I were to pick a theme for 2024 at this point, I would probably say AI. Like most of the tech world, we are very focused on building AI 2.0 into Wyze Cams. Whoever wins the race to AI is going to win the smart home, so it’s absolutely critical for us right now and will likely consume a lot of our engineering resources. We’ll still work on other products, but I expect them to move slower like in 2023. -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| Is it possible that we could still get Brightness, Contrast, & Saturation controls for the cameras? Dongsheng posted an image of a potential cool prototype on Facebook that would give us some options for choosing Brightness, Contrast, & Saturation (ie: a range of -2 to +2). Source: Facebook | Thank you for bringing this up. I appreciate that you remember this. I did not push forward with this mostly because Wyze Cam OG image quality has been tuned really well after a couple of updates so the need to fine-tune images is not as strong anymore. Since the stock image is very balanced and works for most, adding an additional layer of customization will only have marginal benefits while adding complexity costs to the system. -u/WyzeDS |
| Are you thinking of adding new Thermostat features? I ask because on a LinkedIn video event on 8/18/22 at 4pm PT: LinkedIn The PM for it, Mike Sobaski, he just moved from Wyze to Meta, and he will be sorely missed, said in that event starting at around 35:56 “I actually spent all of today working on all of the new features that we’re going to launch on Wyze Thermostat for the next 6 months. And it was so fun to get to define all this, and I read through almost every review, and we were just kind of prioritizing and writing requirements of what ‘this’ is going to be.” And from that, there were rumors that Wyze was releasing new features for the Thermostat because the PM said he was planning and working on some. Wyze has posted 3 Tstat firmware updates since that event, but sadly, we didn’t notice any new features that he was hinting at or working on. Did the Thermostat features he was talking about get canceled due to a shift in the Year of the Camera priorities? If so, is there a chance you’ll pick them back up to release new stuff in 2024? Also, what are the chances of getting a Room sensor to be the primary temperature reading and excluding the Thermostat temp so it quits messing up the average we want? | Thank you for the question. Wyze Thermostat has been in a stable stage for a while with most of the features already delivered. We are not working on new features except for reliability or security improvements if any are required. -u/WyzeDS |
| RTSP support for all cameras and updated support for older ones WHEN? You guys used to support RTSP but you removed the downloads so we have to dig for them and haven’t worked on support for newer cams. Do you plan on working on a feature many of of know and love? | Thanks for the question We are not currently planning on adding RTSP as a standard feature for new cameras. -u/WyzeDS |
| Will we ever be able to do anything with Friendly Faces besides just event sorting? Will you be adding rules/routines with Friendly Faces at some point? Google Home now supports adding triggers to cameras for a “Known Face” or “Unknown Face”. Will you ever add that to Google Home now that it’s supported so we can have our Wyze Video Doorbells announce if it’s someone we know or don’t know at our door (even if it’s not telling us the name of the person)? This would probably be the number one face recognition wish for most people to make it actually useful. | Friendly Faces is still at an early stage and will be a big focus for us next year. Our first priority is to improve the fundamental performance of the model as well as simplify the UI so we can improve the user experience as more customers begin using the feature. Then we’ll look at how to use Friendly Faces to enable a lot of other functions including Rules and automations. -u/WyzeDS |
| Are you still operating on your iconic low-profit margins (single-digit to less than 10% average)? Or has that changed in the last few years now? Someone recently asked me the above question, and I wasn’t sure of the answer. I remember when you said the V3 had a 3% profit margin and your average was less than 10% at the time. I always loved that you aimed for low-margin/high-volume. Source 1:YouTube “We’re a company that has very, very low margins, you know, less than 10% margin” Source 2: YouTube ”…just reaffirming our commitment to being friends with users I think what we’re doing is really really hard; the margin on Wyze, I’m just going to say this, I didn’t get this approved, but the margin on Wyze Cam V3 is 3%! Like what we are doing is kind of insane, and our commitment to users is not wavering, it’s not going away. We’ll do our very best to make amazing products at the lowest possible price and we want to continue to, as we be friends with users that you guys will be friends with us and help us build our products…” How much of the above statements are still relevant today? | It’s a bit higher than it was back during the pandemic, but our hardware margins are still incredibly low. This is especially true for cameras. If you buy a low-cost camera from one of our retail partners like Amazon, we have no margin at all. If you blend all hardware together, we are lucky to hit double digits in any given month. With the deals we are running on Wyze Cam OG right now, we are going to be very, very negative this quarter. I’m scared to see October financials haha. Wyze has been in business for 6 years and has still never been profitable. Obviously, we are going to have to be a profitable business at some point though, and we hope to hit breakeven without needing to sell off any more ownership to investors. We are making good progress towards that goal this year, but that progress is almost entirely driven by Cam Plus. There is a reason why we have said many times that Cam Plus users completely saved Wyze back in 2020! Our service margins are much lower than competitors, but it’s still enough to subsidize hardware costs and keep Wyze on a path to profitability. (Thank you Cam Plus users we love you).-u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| With so many diverse products under the Wyze umbrella, do you think that has contributed greater to the lack of profitability than the low margins themselves? I feel like y’all spread yourselves too thin when you should have focused on a core technology segment. This is coming from someone who wants to see Wyze succeed btw! | Yes, you are correct, this also contributed and is why we’ve tried to chill out on the product launches lately and focus on cameras. Once we hit profitability as a company we will expand to diverse products again. -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| VP of Product Steve McIrvin mentioned in his AMA some thoughts about potentially shifting away from a cloud-only (“cloud-dependent”) paradigm. Obviously, you have no plans to abandon the cloud entirely since your advanced AI with Cam Plus needs it, but you could shift away from full dependency on it so that some things would work better locally when the internet goes out, not to mention FASTER (like light rules turning on and off instantly instead of delayed). Do you have any plans to make efforts toward local functionality with some more things? | Thank you for the questions. This is a pretty big topic. You can, of course, put logic on the device or use local networks for some cases. For example, if you live stream a camera at home today, live streaming is done locally. If you lose your Internet connection, your camera will continue to save footage on your microSD card as long as power is not disrupted. But I can’t say that we are moving toward full local functionality. -u/WyzeDS |
| Is there a Pan Pro on the table? You made a Pro version of the regular cam, of the Outdoor cam, of the Floodlight, and of the Video Doorbell already. When can we expect to see a Pan Pro? I assume it would likely have 2K and a spotlight like all the other Pro versions. Anything else you are thinking about with it? | Link to Answer -u/WyzeDS |
| You always ask such good questions, u/choicehunter | seriously so good haha -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| Will you be improving the app UI part of Friendly Faces? For example, to allow us to select multiple unknown faces at a time to allow us to delete a bunch all at once or move several into the same face profile all at once (instead of 1 by 1 which takes forever)? What about moving faces from one face profile to another (example: sometimes there will be a group of say 6 faces in one file where 5 are of my wife and one is of my daughter, but I have to assign the whole group as 1 face, so then I assign it as my wife’s face and have to go delete my daughter’s face because I can’t move it to the right profile once it is in a profile)? | Thank you for the suggestion. Our current priority is to improve the fundamental performance of the model. Once we get to a really good place, we can look into more advanced features. Though this doesn’t mean that we won’t improve the app UI during this process. -u/WyzeDS |
| In “A letter from the Founders, what to expect in 2023” You indicated 2023 would be a focus on cameras, but also supporting and updating other products and making the best software in existence. Here is a snippet of the concluding paragraph: “this year, much like our first year in business, will be the year of the CAMERA. With your help, we will revisit everything about the Wyze Cam experience. We will focus hard on hearing all your feedback and making the best camera hardware and software in existence. Product launches in 2023 will also be focused on cameras, with few exceptions. Get ready for some big camera announcements in just a few weeks! And we will of course* continue to support and update all Wyze products” How do you feel you have done in 2023 to fulfill these 5 promises, and how can you still improve: 1.Focussing hard on hearing all our feedback 2.Making the best camera hardware in existence 3.Making the best camera software in existence 4.Continuing to support all Wyze Products 5.Continuing to update all Wyze Products. I’d love to hear your perspective on what you’ve done to uphold those promises throughout The Year of the Camera in 2023, and what your plans are for those 5 things for the rest of the year (and the future).* | Loving the follow-up for the goals we set last year. All of these goals are quite aspirational and hard to know if they are officially accomplished yet, but we have certainly made a ton of progress. 1.We’ve always tried to listen closely to user feedback, but we’ve definitely done a better job of that this year. We cleaned up and updated our product Wishlist, we continued Fix-It Friday and have resolved many submitted bugs that were bugging you, we continue to have full-time employees in all of our communities that watch for feedback to report to our Product Team, we updated processes and cross-collaboration between customer-facing teams and engineers, we added a social listening service to help keep track of user sentiment and catch issues earlier, and the whole camera focus itself is a result of customer feedback. Putting less time on non-camera products to improve the camera and subscription experience was heavily requested. And hey, we even started pushing out Dark Mode…a bit. It’s hard to measure exactly how much we’ve improved, but we certainly have put tons of resources into our listening skills. 2.We launched 6 new cameras this year and priced them as competitively as possible, so we’ve given it our best shot. But we’ll leave that for you to decide. More to come.  3.Still plenty of work to do on the software side, though we’ve made tons of improvements this year. We’ve focused on stability and connectivity, put in checks to recover faster and more effectively from outages, added some cool experimental features like Picture-in-Picture and Smart Focus, added the ability to put different types of cameras in camera groups, and we built a new camera scrubber and made Friendly Faces accessible to way more users this week. This one is a neverending goal so it will always feel unfinished and unsatisfied, but we are working on it! We hope with the new AI that we can really fulfill this promise on another level. 4 + 5. We have not stopped supporting any Wyze products, though we have stopped selling some and let them go EOL. On these products, when specific high-impact bugs have been brought to our attention through Fix-It-Friday, we have fixed them. But we haven’t been putting out active updates for all of our products (especially the stable ones) to better focus on cameras. -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| Questions regarding the Caching issue on the Webview service that was in the news. TLDR; You responded well in some ways to the recent Webview Caching Issue, but why didn’t you just email everyone about it? First, to mention what you did well (them improvement thoughts): You reacted fast (WAY faster than other companies that have had a similar global caching issue). You took it offline within 30-40 minutes (other billion dollar companies took hours or in one case MONTHS from the first report before they fixed their global caching problems). So you get props on response time. You fixed it fast and brought it online within a few hours with some new redundancies in place. That was good too. Timeline: You publicly told us the problem fast and posted it on your website and many of the major social media platforms. Your first messages that I saw were posted by as early as 2:50pm PT. The main explanation was posted by 6:42pm with all the real details telling us it was a caching issue, which told us basically everything. The first 3rd party article/blog/news-site to mention anything didn’t come for at least another 2hrs at 8:45pm PT by TheVerge. (I will post in a minute how many people feel you could’ve/should’ve done some things differently on the timeline too). And then Wirecutter didn’t post anything for DAYS after you’d already announced what happened, with an explanation that more details would be forthcoming when your investigation was complete (this is all reasonable so far IMO) You personally contacted everyone who was directly affected (good again), and we heard from some of them that they were satisfied with your response, so it’s hard to argue with that. You outlined a detailed list of your investigation’s findings and what you were doing to rectify the situation, including hiring an external security firm to do further testing of all systems, etc. I won’t relist them all here, but anyone can go read them for themselves: Wyze Web View Service Advisory - 9/8/2023 So far, I think all of the above is great (the initial mistake isn’t great, of course, but the response time and final outcome are pretty reasonable --at least to ME). I know the news media is a little offended that you didn’t do some special press-release for them to do an easy copy paste sound-bite for them to make money off of or whatever, but for many Wyze customers, the REAL concern is that many people felt a little hurt that you didn’t just email everyone so we could hear something important like this from YOU first instead of being blindsided by rage-bait journalists. We don’t expect a full disclosure of EVERY security update you make, nobody does that, they just say “security updates” in their logs or whatever and not exactly what they were, but this issue was fairly public and Wyze long ago chose to adopt a core value of “Be Friends with users” and if you are someone’s friend, you proactively reach out to them to tell them about important things going on with you rather than let them get blind-sided by biased and self-serving rage-bait and wonder why you didn’t make the extra effort to make sure they heard it from you first. Yes, you did good public responses on your website and social media accounts, but not everyone follows those daily, or at all, so it seems something like an email would’ve better ensured your “friends” didn’t get blindsided by rage-bait. How will you step up your motto of being friends with users in the future &/or clarify your communication policies for such things? | This is a really tough question that deserves a longer answer. A question that we asked ourselves with some serious reflection after the article came out from Wired that was very critical of our response. First of all, we feel terrible about it. I know that nothing I say will make anyone feel better about it. These things are literally the worst part about being in the IoT business. For a quick recap, this issue happened on a web viewing platform locked behind a paywall. It had no affect on the Wyze app, so we know it was isolated to a very small number of users. We found that 10 users on that platform had their streams visible to a other customers logged on in the time before we shut down access to the platform. We are absolutely certain that this issue didn’t exist on the Wyze app. If it had, our response would have been much more serious and would have included a full email and other notifications to all customers. I appreciate you pointing out the things we did right haha, cause it has been mostly criticism that we hear. Honestly, we did not feel like we were trying to hide anything as accused of in some of the articles. As you pointed out we were telling everybody in real time what we were discovering in the investigation and what we were doing to address it on our Service Status page and posts in our communities. We emailed the affected users. We responded right away to customers on social media that there was an issue with view.wyze.com and that we took it down. We followed up on social media, our website, and our forum with multiple updates in the following days detailing exactly what happened and how we addressed it. There are definitely some things we could have done better and we have been paying attention to the feedback. We plan on being more transparent in the future. You are right, a friend would want to hear directly before getting hit with an article like that. After the article, we considered a full email so we reached out to a PR agency and some security professionals to get their opinion on our response and if they recommended that we do more. They consistently said that they would have followed the same steps that we took. So I honestly don’t know. Just a really tough spot and probably would have been better to just do a full email to remove any doubt that we were trying to hide it. We’re going to do our best to make sure we don’t have another opportunity to find out. We are very sorry for letting our users down on this one!! -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| Are you still planning to add motion-object-detection to your AI detections for other cameras? Right now, the AI is just analyzing still-frames for most cameras (so it notifies us of parked cars for example, not just moving cars). You started adding motion AI Object detection on the Floodlight Pro. When will you expand that to other cameras? | Great question. Yes, we are looking at AI functions like moving vehicle detection. -u/WyzeDS |
| Are you still thinking about allowing Cam Plus users to create a Public Live Stream with our cameras? For context, you made a social media post such as this on Instagram: where you had been live streaming about the UW Campus Cherry Blossoms as a public webcam and indicated you were testing your “live stream capabilities that we hope to a make a feature of Wyze Cams in the future” such as to stream to Youtube, Facebook, or other sites of our choice. You even did a survey back in April asking users questions related to this and how they would potentially use it if you do offer it. Is this still something you hope to make a feature of Wyze cams? Would it be using WebRTC, or RTSP, or what kind of protocol? Anything you can tell us about this? | We really like this feature, and have had some great internal debates on whether or not we should finish building this to be customer facing. We haven’t finished it yet because from the survey results and our research we didn’t really think there was a ton of customer demand for it. Or that it wasn’t as important as other features we’ve been working on. But it’s still on the roadmap and it’s about half built, though I don’t know when we will decide to finish it. It uses RTMP protocol. -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
haha
Sounds like a good unbiased and accurate summary to me.