Received an email from Wyze about how Person Detection is going to cost them more than they thought and because they think of us as friends, they’d like us to basically decide how much we want to pay them for this service. Now remember they had popped off how it was supposed to be free for everyone.
This is exactly what I though would happen with Wyze. When a company starts making too many products, it stretches them financially. They can say all they want that we’re “friends”, but my friends don’t ask me for money because they conduct their lives in a financially responsible manner. So no Wyze, I won’t pay you anything for this service. And it’s this sort of thing that will move me to another company.
I haven’t received the message either, even though I absolutely was one of those who received the promise message last year. I’ve referenced it in this forum a few times. Perhaps their mail servers are yet another flaky part of the Wyze ecosystem.
Person Detection was a primary feature when I purchased my Wyze cams. It went away shortly afterwards and hasn’t returned. Now something that was originally part of the product I purchased may be something I have to pay extra for? Asking for donation model and if that doesn’t work? Can you imagine buying some other piece of technology and one of the major features disappears then later returns but only as an extra recurring fee? Friends don’t do this to friends and I’m pretty sure there are legal issues to boot.
So far, although I am a beta tester, the Person Detection on my cameras, in two different houses, fail to distinguish between people, trees, cars, etc. With Person Detection enabled, I get maybe 20% accuracy. About the same as with Motion Detection alone. Their email notification suggested that the Person Detection beta is working well. Certainly not in my case. If it ever works, then I might consider paying something, but not until then.
Person Detection has not worked correctly for me either and I certainly won’t be paying for it. Wyze has steadily been losing my support of their brand with all the increased costs.
Today I received 37 Person Detection alerts on my Wyze Pan Cam as a pilot tester. 34 alerts were cars or trees moving. So 3 were real people. I also received many additional alerts that were sent to me as simple Motion Alerts. I would not pay for this level of accuracy.
Very disturbing to hear that Wyze is struggling with supporting person detection as an included feature. The low product price was one reason to buy a Wyze camera, but THE TWO deciding reasons were person detection and no monthly fees. Take away “the two” and you are left with cheep cameras, and that is not a market differentiator.
I have more than ten cameras monitoring two homes, but for simple math let’s say ten. If you charge me $2 per camera per month that is $240 a year an $2,240 for 10 years - OUCH! Even if you charge $10 per month per account (unlimited number of cameras) it is not what I made an investment in and was sold when I purchased your cameras.
Yes I understand and appreciate you now can’t analysis in the camera (probably a patent conflict) and Wyze now has an overhead cost to process in the cloud. But you need to preserve the free person detection feature if you want to stay relevant in the market and with your community of friends and supporters.
Have you considered:
Add a pre test/filter in the camera and reduce the amount of analytics in the cloud.
Offer a base station to do the person analytics on-prem (includ a few other good features to justify the added cost of a base station).
Develop and offer a suite of fee based services to offset the cost of basic free person detection.
Good luck, this could be a deciding point in the future of Wyze…
A few years ago the WyzeCam person detection feature was implemented in firmware and was reliable and accurate. Then it was removed for some reason. I still have some older ones with person detection since I never upgraded the firmware.
Why can’t you find a programmer who can write person detection code? I have used person detection libraries in Python (OpenCV). It is easy! High school kids are doing it.
In electronics, we (all of us) are used to functionality improvements while prices stay the same or go down. I think you should figure out a way to add person detection to firmware for free and don’t make excuses about cloud cost. Anyway, cloud cost is decreasing drastically. You may have heard of the recently proposed Bezos’ Law, which states that “a unit of [cloud] computing power price is reduced by 50 percent approximately every three years.”
Dear Wyze,
Please look up the “HOG” algorithm for person detection. It has been around for decades and I can’t imagine that it would take an experienced coder more than a couple of weeks to implement. Then you don’t need any cloud nonsense. Do everything onboard. We (Wyze users) will appreciate it!
Thank you.
Perfectly said and yes legally this is uncouth, immoral and illegal but mainly uncouth and dastardly because those are fun words. I have a connection to Hank Barry of Sidley Austin LLP who is now president of the Palo Alto branch of basically a Superfirm and he was once CEO of Napster when the 2 Shawn/Seans were getting in deep Sh&t. He basically created internet law and im sure he would enjoy answering this one for us the wyze community. I am a big fan of the products but this behavior is not so hip and as mentioned, uncouth AF. Goo day sir.
Asking for payment after the release of a product that originally contained a feature is just begging for legal action. I’m a beta tester also and find the person detection fair at best. I submit many mis-identifications to Wyze, so I assume it will get better with time.
There are open source AI person detection out there, so there are other solutions.
I really doubt legal action is a concern since subscription plans change all the time. But it certainly isn’t cool of Wyze. It’s simple if you want to keep your customer base happy, then don’t pop off about free features and then decide to charge for them later.
