Time Sensitive: Important Message for Emergency Button Testers

Beta
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Hello Emergency Button Beta Tester,

First, I would like to thank you for the time you took to test the Emergency Button. I have received a lot of feedback from you on the behavior and the potential improvements.

I would like to talk to you about what is going to happen in the coming days starting with today. Please read this through.
Today, the Emergency Button is going to disappear from the Wyze app. This is normal and expected as we are preparing for the official release and we have to switch some settings in the back end.
In the coming days, we will be releasing the mobile app (v2.10+) that you have been beta testing. Note that the release is for the app only. The firmware release will be happening at a later date after further testing. I am not involved with those discussions and canā€™t give further details.
Upon the 2.10+ release, you might see the Emergency Button mentioned in the Release Notes but the Emergency Button will not be accessible at this point. This is because we need to perform some extra tests to make sure that the changes we have done in the back end did not cause any errors.
If everything goes well, the Emergency Button is expected to become available on May 7th.
At that point, it will be fully functional. This means that if you create an Alarm, the Monitoring Center will be contacted and will treat it as an emergency. We are not in the testing mode anymore. You can still cancel the alarm as it is a standard feature but Karen will start to engage the person who created the alarm through SMS or even call directly.

For the beta testers, your previous enrollment will continue and you should not have to sign up again. If you do not wish to use the Emergency Button anymore, you should remove all the devices from the location and/or delete the location itself. This will prevent usage of the Emergency Button.
Last point, you will see in the service page in the mobile app that we are releasing the Emergency Button under the term ā€œPilotā€ and that it is free while in pilot. How long will the pilot phase last? This is yet to be decided but I can almost guarantee it will stay in pilot until July or later.
We will improve the experience in the upcoming release but will most likely focus heavily on what is coming after the Emergency Button.

Again, thank you for the work performed and the time you dedicated to testing the Emergency Button. It has been incredibly helpful.

4 Likes
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Hello @Frederik!!

Thank you for this! I am exited to have the Emergency Button on the app and am happy to hear it is going to actually work like an emergency button! I would like to test it once or twice and will make sure I cancelšŸ˜‰.

Are you saying that there is only one person at the monitoring center who is taking care of all Wyze emergencies? Or is ā€œKarenā€ a bot who finds out if it is an actual Emergecy and then contacts the Emergency center?

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:smiley:

Here is how this is working behind the scene. Please keep that in the beta forum please.

The first SMS you are receiving is automated and there is a predefined message including the name Karen. Anything past that first SMS is an actual and very real person but Iā€™m afraid to say their name is very likely not ā€œKarenā€. The number of people that are staffing the monitoring center is variable based on the time of the day, the day of the week and any other criteria that might predict a peak of call.
I actually visited one of the monitoring center. It is composed of truly safety/security specialists and professionals.
The assessment if it is an actual emergency is done by a human, not an AI. Always.

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In the long term development of the emergency app, ask the developers to have a look at https://smart911.com/

More and more emergency responders in larger cities are supplementing their records using smart911.com. One issue that comes to mind in my case is that I live in a 16-acre condominium complex. if I gave you my building and unit number, itā€™d take you 20 minutes to figure out where my unit is. If I recall correctly, smart911 let me enter some notes attached to the street address which gives responders a clue about which part of the development I live in, north central.

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I will look into the smart911 reference provided.
The use case you are providing is exactly why we have one screen that allows to provide special entry instructions.

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Awesome thanks for confirming that!! I will keep this info in the betašŸ˜‰

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