Part 2 of 2 of AMA - Wyze Founders and Product Managers | 10/27/2023
Wyze answered so many questions that this AMA was too long to go in a single post (32000 character limit per post), so this is the 2nd of 2 posts. Please see the first post for more answers.
| Question | Reply |
|---|---|
| There was talk a while ago of smart switches that didn’t need a neutral. Is this still on the table or was it abandoned? | We’re sorry, there is a technical challenge that we haven’t been able to overcome. We don’t believe that the tradeoff would offer an acceptable experience to customers so we cancelled the project. -u/WyzeDS |
| Will you please add more Settings and Features to the Wyze Mesh Routers? The Mesh Routers have EXCELLENT performance, but the current settings and features are among the most basic and limited of any router I have ever owned. Will you please add more some of the requests for the routers listed in your official wishlist for it here: Add features to the Wyze Mesh Router and Router Pro Some of the above are basic expectations, some are more advanced, but nearly all of them are basically already programmed out for you since your router is based on OpenWRT firmware. You should be able to basically just copy paste the add-ons for half of those requests with little effort. 2023 is the year of the camera and most of your resources went to cameras…but will you commit to doing something more for the routers in 2024? | For the router, our plan is to keep it stable and do patches when necessary. We are not looking to drastically increase the feature set at this time. We think the current feature set is good for general usage and there are complications with adding additional features. -u/WyzeDS |
| AI: More Zones for Cams. Futures of AI: As you proceed with more AI capability, please consider adding more named zones so we can differentiate and act on events in different areas based on zone & time of day. I have been using this with Dropcam for the past ~10 years. | Thank you for the suggestion. We’ll look into this as we plan for better detection and AI capability. -u/WyzeDS |
| Alexa and IFFT. Now that Amazon is pulling Alexa from IFFT, are you going to add camera on/off support to your Alexa skill? | We just saw that news and will need to take a look at what that feature would require. -u/WyzeDS |
| Is the Battery Cam Pro still on track to get a Timelapse feature by the end of the year? | We are still looking at the end of this year or early next year. u/WyzeDS |
| Matter standards exist for plugs, bulbs, light strips, etc…. Why is this being overlooked and not being implemented into current wyze lineups of those products? Is Wyze waiting until camera standards are released? | The Matter protocol needs to be built with new products. Current products do not have enough memory to support OTA (over-the-air updates) to enable Matter. -u/WyzeDS |
| When will you release a Black OG Stack Kit/Adapter? You released a Black OG cam, but no Black OG Stack kit adapter, and it can look kind of tacky stacking 2 Black OG’s with a white stack adapter. Also, when will we get a Black OG-Telephoto cam and a 2-pack of black OG and Telephoto with the stack kit adapter like you have with the White? | We’re glad that you liked the Wyze Cam OG and OG Telephoto combo. Unfortunately, we are not planning on a black telephoto or stack kit because the R&D (more complex than just paint) for mass production isn’t justified by the market response. We suggest using the white combo or perhaps some DIY solutions (though DIY can break warranty so be careful). -u/WyzeDS |
| What’s the status of the “Smart Vision” feature? Are you still planning to add more camera models for it? Do you plan to ever extend it to Cam Plus or Cam Plus Unlimited like you did with Friendly Faces? | We are still working on this feature. We received lots of feedback from actual users and are thinking about and working on making it more useful. Then we will work on support for more camera models. -u/WyzeDS |
| Will you expand Smart Vision to be able to do more than one training project per camera? Example: People who want a camera to tell the difference between multiple pets on the same camera. I believe right now, we can train a camera to recognize 1 specific pet vs anything that is not that pet, but some people with more than 1 pet might want a camera to be able to tell whether it is Pet A, Pet B, or Pet C, or not any of those; instead of being limited to Pet A or Not Pet A. Furthermore, what happens if you train a Camera where the 2 groups are “any of my pets” (training images containing just my dog, my cat, etc) vs “not my pets” (pictures of other pets or no pets)? Is that possible, or would you need to do each pet separately? | To allow cameras to recognize more than one targeting object at a time, we need to spend more time on researching performance and finetune the model. So we won’t make promises yet but it is on our radar. To allow cameras to recognize more than one targeting object at a time, we need to spend more time on researching performance and finetune the model. So we won’t make promises yet but it is on our radar. -u/WyzeDS |
| Will there be 4K POE security cameras? What about better integration with Google and Home Assistant? | We do not have a 4K POE camera on the roadmap as of now. Regarding Google and Home Assistant integrations, please refer to this AMA thread with a dedicated discussion about them: Link -u/WyzeDS |
| Has any progress been made on a smart button? I own many bulbs, plugs, and a few switches, but almost never use them because voice control or the app is too slow and too much work vs just pushing a button. A smart button would be amazing and I would use them all around the house, as long as they were fast. Local control for these devices would be extremely important. Since this is the year of the camera I imagine this project was paused. Is there any plan to resume? | Thank you for bringing this up. It is indeed paused as we are focusing on cameras. We have not planned on resuming it. -u/WyzeDS |
| Expanding on a question by u/choicehunter. I believe FPS/bitrate (especially bitrate) should be user choice. People with good wifi infrastructure are punished for the ones who don’t. The compression is really severe and it would be nice for it to be up to the user to find the balance for what works on their networks. | From an individual user’s perspective, I totally agree with you. But when we consider millions of perspectives, most of which are not technically inclined to fine-tune this, our focus is to make sure it works for the majority with the best performance it can have. To be completely honest, every feature has a cost, development cost, testing cost, maintenance cost, and if we do add it, it will need to be added to all future cameras. The costs for doing this are not trivial. Unless we can find a specific and sizable enough market for it, just adding this as a nice-to-have feature is not very high on our priority list. -u/WyzeDS |
| 4K video for cameras Any plans down the pipeline to add 2K or 4K video to the V3 or any future V4? | We do not have an immediate roadmap for 4K. But I will neither confirm nor deny 2K.  -u/WyzeDS |
| I have many issues but I will limit it to 3. 1.Home Assistant - When can we get local integration with your products so we don’t have to go over the cloud to view cameras, access sensors, etc? I have already begun to hunt for other brands just because they already have an open API or one for Home Assistant. 2.Product synchronization is a huge problem. UI across cameras / floodlights / doorbells, etc should be the same, but they are all hit and miss where some features mirror each other, and other products have completely different UIs. Some cameras have things that their prior version could, but just don’t. This applies to UI / app rules, etc etc 3.Why no 5 GHz support across the board? I understand it’s a cost increase, but the 2.4 GHz band is flooded and saturated. The only devices that reliably load on my network 100% of the time are the ones on 5 GHz. I have multiple APs across my home to try and make things better, but it’s still never good enough. We need better connectivity options. Right now anything you put out is using Wi-Fi 4 standards, which is from 2009. | 1.Please refer to the dedicated Home Assistant question here: 2. Thank you for bringing this up. It’s true that the UI is not all consistent and aligned. It is a constant balance between being consistent and adding to or improving new experiences. I imagine this will continue to exist, but we are trying our best to improve. 3. Some of the new cameras support 5GHz (such as Wyze Cam Floodlight Pro and Wyze Battery Cam Pro). We are in the transition period where dual-band Wi-Fi 4 is old, but dual-band Wi-Fi 6 is new. There still are not many good options between cost and performance. But this is changing quickly and we expect dual-band Wi-Fi 6 to be the standard soon. -u/WyzeDS |
| Is there any plan for a black solar panel to match the black BCP? | We currently don’t have any plans for a black solar panel. -u/Bitter-Painter-3661 |
| are you going to put more products on the Global.wyze.com website or do you have no interest in the international market ? nothing has been added to the site in almost a year | We definitely have a ton of interest in international expansion. We plan on this being a much bigger focus for us in 2024, but it will mostly be led by cameras. We will expand internationally through a number of different ways with Amazon, global.wyze.com, with partners, or with our own warehouses like we’ve done in Canada. So yes, expect more products, but they will probably just be our newer cameras for now. Once we establish a big enough customer base in a country with cameras, we can start to offer other smart home products too, just like we did in the US and Canada markets. -u/WyzeCoFounderDave |
| Friendly Faces = Facial Recognition is being promoted now as included in Cam+ Unlimited which is exciting BUT it is limited based on some locations/cities. Can you give detail on why and clarify if it is “not supported” in those regions or “unavailable”? Ever since this feature began in beta it has been a very unclear small print item that it was not allowed in a few places. Very very disappointing and not obvious at all! | We are limited in what we’re able to say on this issue from a legal standpoint. But we did enjoy reading the response from u/choicehunter. Link -u/WyzeDS |
| Why can we not use friendly faces in Texas and what would happen if we did? | We are limited in what we’re able to say on this issue from a legal standpoint. But we did enjoy reading this post about this issue from a community member: Link -u/WyzeDS |
EDIT: The post they said they did “enjoy reading” in the last 2 answers related to why Friendly Faces was restricted in some locations was this comment:
