I called support because I didn’t want to go crazy typing what I see on my screen into a chat window. If you work at Wyze, you should call support to see what that is like. There are looped recording saying “use chat” over and over on a short loop. Really rough on the paying customer.
When I got through I got a knowledgable gentleman who had no idea I was a paying customer. I asked him to take my word for it. He says I must have bought my cam plus licences from Apple so how the hell would Wyze know I’m a customer… fairly bewildering stuff.
Anyway, what I want is to record an event when the camera a sees a person. I thought that’s what I paid for. I paid for that feature because I don’t like sifting through videos of a branch blowing in the wind. That’s just motion detection and its not particularly useful unless the scene is very controlled.
So I turned off motion detection and went into the Cam Plus AI detection section and enabled what I want. Apparently that’s wrong. This is a serious UI mistake I think.
Detects motion needs to be on. The person detection pertains to Notifications only. The event video is sent to the cloud, the AI views it an assigns Person, package, vehicle or what ever. Go to notification for the cam in the app, tap WYZE AI events for the items you want notifications for. If you choose all other motion events you will be getting many, many notifications.
In the events tab, you can also filter for just those recordings flagged as Person.
Detects motion is required if you want the camera to know when it should upload a recording to the cloud. Motion detection is done locally on the camera so it is kind of seen as a separate toggle from the cloud toggles.
AI Detection is all about the cloud videos. It will search the uploaded videos for whichever kind of objects you select (person, vehicle, pet, package, etc).
But there will be nothing for the AI to search if there are no cloud videos, so you do need Motion Detection enabled so the camera knows to upload something.
Having said all that you make a great UI recommendation for Wyze to make it obvious that AI detection is dependent on Motion detection. Your idea to make motion detection a primary selection, and AI detections a sub-selection underneath it that is greyed out when it is toggled off and only accessible if the motion detection is enabled.is a good suggestion. This will make it much more clear to users.
Ok that’s cool. Am I correct that this could not be more confusing? If you turn off Motion Detection… why does it allow me to play with Camp Plust settings? Shouldn’t it say something to the effect of what you said? Typically this scenario is handled by greying out the options so the user can see they are there, but needs to enable a switch (motion detection) to enable the downstream features (person detection).
Am I correct? Please feel free to tell me I am not.
Thanks Bill. But there are no events… because motion detection is off. That’s the whole point of confusion.
Yes, that is what I was trying to describe in my last paragraph. It would be more clear to update the design this way. I think your suggestion is a good one.
