Ended: Wyze Cam Plus Team Reddit AMA - 8/3/22 1:00 PM Pacific

[carverofchoice]

AMA SUMMARY FOR: “We’re the Wyze Cam Plus Team, AMA! - 8/3/22”

Since one of the main parts of Cam Plus is AI, how is your team different from the AI Team, what other responsibilities do you have?

great question! The two teams work very very close together. The biggest differentiator is that the AI team focuses on the more technical aspects of the service (improving the technology and building new models/features). On the other hand, the Cam Plus team focuses on the entire user experience, which includes AI.

Steve McIrvin mentioned you “have specific products on the horizon that will address a lot of the value that RTSP can provide”…can you elaborate on any of this? Will the Cam Plus team have something to do with future RTSP-like updates?

Great question! We don’t have any specific update on the RTSP side yet, but we are working closely with Steve’s team to make sure everything is working seamlessly.

Data Sharing Policies with Law Enforcement

While it doesn’t touch on all of your questions, I can share our recent public statement on this subject matter:

From time to time, law enforcement personnel issue subpoenas/warrants to Wyze that legally compel Wyze to provide customer data in its possession to the extent that customer data is responsive to the subpoena/warrant.

If Wyze has customer data in its possession that is responsive to the subpoena/warrant, Wyze will provide that customer data to the law enforcement personnel, as it is legally required to do.

Wyze does not provide customer data to law enforcement personnel without first receiving a valid subpoena or warrant for that customer data.

Do you have any Video Playback Scrubbing improvements/updates coming up that you can tell us about?

Thank you for the question! This was on our list but got delayed due to limited resources over the past few months. We are hoping to join forces with some external help to improve the scrubbing experience by the end of the year!

When will we get the V3 firmware update for Cam Plus notifications like the V2’s have where we have separate notification toggles for Person, Pet, Vehicle, and Package instead of 1 toggle for all or none?

We are working on this feature for v3 and Pan v2 cameras, which we hope to include within the next few firmware releases in the coming months. Stay tuned!

How can Wyze improve Cam Plus notifications? Currently, Wyze sends 1 notification per event and the only order of operations (detection hierarchy/priority) is based on the earliest frame with a detection. Therefore, if a car or pet triggers an event or is detected first, and then a few seconds later, a person arrives in the event and is detected later, we will only be notified about the first detection and not realize from the notification that there was also a person who came into the event. Yes, the event tags will be updated if we filter events later, but the notification can mislead us into thinking there was no human in the event. Is it possible to retroactively update/modify a push notification? Can you send a second notification if a person is later detected? This might be especially critical for Cam Plus Pro security.

This is a great suggestion, and is something we are actually currently working on! We hope to have it ready towards the end of this year or early next year.
We are always focused on trying to provide a user experience balanced on not sending too many notifications, while also giving as much information as possible.

In regards to the “Submit Feedback” button. How is feedback handled? Say I submit feedback of something AI detected as a person but is actually a pet. I make the corrections and submit. What happens? How is feedback incorporated? Is every single correction taken into account?

The feedback submitting process will log all corresponding details to facilitate further debugging or data utilization for AI improvement. Every ‘submit’ button click will create an instance of a feedback entity, which includes information of the event video, the device metadata, the AI detection results and user checked tags. Given these records, we are able to easily identify AI failures on both false and miss. So it’s greatly helpful if you can check the expected tags when you submit feedback. Thank you for the question!

How secure is submitting feedback. My cameras cover nearly my whole property, I’m willingly giving that data up for AI improvements, is this access revoked once necessary improvements are implemented? Do humans see the submitted videos?

Thanks for your support in helping us improve our AI! All data submitted through the feedback channel is handled with enterprise security processes, and applied with extensive access control. The data is only being used to improve our AI models, and is only reachable by Wyze employees who are doing this specific job. Some submitted videos are reviewed by a human to better understand the content and provide the right supervision to guide the machine models, but we do not have any out-sourced workforce to conduct the data labeling. All data annotation efforts are completed by the Wyze team. Submitted feedback videos can be revoked and deleted at contributors’ request, and the processed data for model training has a retention policy applied for it to be expired and destroyed.

I’ve been submitting feedback like a mad man in order to help the AI the best I can. This means every single event caught on 22 cameras , what % of correction does each feedback give? For example, AI has a very tough time distinguishing chickens as a pet and instead thinks their people.

Thank you SO MUCH for submitting all of that feedback! Your submitted feedback videos are very important to the process of improving our AI models. We don’t have an accurate estimate on the %, but your feedback videos are added to the same pool with all other users’ and the more everyone submits, the better.
We are very sorry to hear that our AI is mistaking chickens as people for you! There could be something else wrong causing it to misidentify as a person. If you can share your device MAC and a screenshot including the event timestamps, we can take a look at what is happening for you!

Both Steve McIrvin and the AI team indicated that 2K cameras are on your radar for future devices. How do you expect this might affect Cam Plus? Will there be more limitations on 2K? Will the resolution be lower? Will you raise prices to compensate since your profit margins are kept low? Will things stay the same?

Great question! 2K cameras will help Cam Plus get better quality videos for sure, which unlocks capabilities of our AI models to be able to detect more objects with higher accuracy! We are so excited to utilize the capabilities of new hardware to develop more features that bring even more value to our users. Making technology accessible to everyone has been our core value since the beginning of Wyze!

Will friendly faces ever come to cam plus or on the doorbell?

The team is working on the both of these! We’ll be sure to update you all when they become available.

Will friendly faces ever be expanded to allow more than 10 faces with Cam Plus Pro or Cam Plus in the future?

We don’t currently have any plans to increase the cap to beyond 10 people, but as Friendly Faces is rolled out to more services and devices we will review the cap and make changes as needed.

Is it possible for us to get a bi-weekly/monthly email "Progress Report "with working status of the level of progress with each of your products? I constantly see answers that say we are aware and working on such and such issue, or a fix is in beta but we never know what stage of progress the fix is in. I guess I’m just hoping for estimated time frames of the stages so we know what’s going on.

We launched our “Fix-It Friday” initiative at the beginning of this year, in which we take the top voted issue from each of our communities on the first Friday of each month and share weekly updates on our progress to fix them until they are resolved.

Additionally, we are in the early stages of coming up with a roadmap spin-off that we hope to tackle the exact kind of uncertainty you touched on in your comment. We want to make it easier to know what we’re working on and what we’re working towards!

Will webview ever be available for non cam-plus users?

The Web View project is still in beta testing, where we have made several big improvements. It’ll be rolled out later this year with several key updates. Right now it’s only accessible to Cam Plus users due to the cost associated with each streaming channel. That said, we are still exploring an alternative solution to hopefully open it up to more non Cam Plus customers later on down the road.

When will webview work on Firefox?

It requires some extra work to make it compatible on Firefox, but we are actively working on a fix right now! We will share the latest news once it’s ready.

Will Cam Plus ever allow the Sound Detections (Crying detection, etc) to be used as triggers?

Great question! Yes, that is the goal. Sound Detection is still in beta, so there are improvements to be made on this feature first. But we definitely want it to be compatible with the broader Wyze ecosystem, so we’ll let you know as soon as that trigger is available!

Will users with shared cams be gaining more access to other features in the future? When we share a cam with Cam Plus, the shared user gets some Cam Plus benefits, but not all of them.

Thank you for the question, this is great feedback! Can you tell us a little bit more about what other features you would like to open to shared devices besides videos and AI tags? We were working on sharing features, including adding subscriptions to a shared camera, however some efforts get delayed due to limited resources. We definitely want to revisit them this year!

What other new features or benefits do you have in mind for adding to Cam Plus in the future (besides Friendly Faces and the Smart Vision which you announced last year would be coming out eventually)?

Yes, we are working hard on a few new features and hope to add more value for our Cam Plus subscribers! The one nearest to launch is to provide insight to events, such as reporting abnormal activities during night time, providing a package timeline so you can identify the package status, etc. As always, we will keep you updated as they become available!

What are the chances of getting an event Filter option that lists all events that qualified as notifications? (once we open the app with one notification, all the rest disappear)

Great suggestion! We are working on a feature that will provide more insight into your events, such as displaying how many person events were triggered in the past few hours, or any abnormal activities that happened during the night. Our goal is to provide users with more tools to identify critical events, without solely relying on notifications. We will keep you posted on this feature release, and feel free to share more feedback like this! Thank you!

Can you please fix the bug that shows my camera as offline, but is otherwise fully functional?

Our team is actively working hard on this! We rolled out a beta firmware previously, but it needed a little more time in the oven. We’re hoping to expand the fixed firmware in beta soon and roll it out to everyone else soon thereafter.

These are big firmware updates that do fundamental changes towards easier maintenance and greater stability, so we’re being cautious to avoid causing bigger issues. We appreciate your patience!

The AI team indicated they are working on some degree of local/edge AI features for the future. How will this impact your Cam Plus Team if more detections are done locally on the hardware in the future?

The ultimate goal for Wyze teams is to provide the best AI experiences and make them as approachable as we can. This process involves lots of considerations, incl. camera models, resource consumption (CPU, power etc), privacy, accuracy, speed, as well as the local and cloud. Right now the AI team is working on a hybrid mode to push the envelope. Meanwhile, Edge AI specific use cases are also on our radar to investigate.

The AI team told us that now the AI compares the detections zone against the motion region and the AI will only tag the video if there is an overlap. What happens if half of a person is within the detection and half the person is in the blocked-out zone? (ex: feet on sidewalk, but the road behind it is blocked out, so the upper body of the person is blocked out) Will the AI consider things outside of the detection to detect a person that is partially in a detection zone and connected to something within the detection zone? Or is it strictly limited to viewing objects 100% in the detection zone boundaries (thus not seeing a head, arms, etc and thus not a person)?

Thanks for raising this question. It can help to clarify the expectation when you enable both AI and the detection zone on your camera. We aim to eliminate unexpected AI tags outside of the specified detection zone. The current working logic is to consider the overlap between the detected region of an AI tag and the detection zone, and we only report AI results when the overlap is larger than a small pre-defined number. So it works to report results when an object comes into the zone even partially, regardless of which part. We hope this strategy can deliver a good user experience overall, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Why is the alarm notification tied into the update and app notification? I have an alarm alarm sound for when my cam senses movement so I recognize it wherever I am. The problem is that when just the app updates or has a non-alarm message, since you cannot separate an app alert from an alarm alert, it always blares my alarm. This has happened in the middle of the night, it happens when I simply just open the app and therefore the notification pops up, Wyze app is running in the background. This seems like a no-brainer thing to separate. Also, any plans on maybe reducing the battery drain on location based services? My phone drops like 25% at least just from Wyze constantly checking the geofencing.

Great suggestions! You’re right, it does make sense to separate the messages. We’ll add these to our list and keep you posted!