What's going on with person detection?

This is true now, but mostly only for anyone who has purchased these in the last half of this year (and promoting the person detection doesn’t mean it had to be on Amazon specifically, but any official Wyze promotions anywhere). However, there was a long period of time over several months where Wyze specifically sold a ton of these from telling people they had free person detection, it was then taken away. Granted, much of this was not Wyze’s fault, but the fact remains that they DID actually advertise and promote free person detection in an effort to sell tons of cams to people who are now stuck with a cam doesn’t function the way they were originally promised and for the purposes they initially ordered them. This is understandably frustrating and not out of place for someone to be upset over. At the same time, Wyze became stuck in a terrible Catch-22 without any win-win solutions, and found a middle-ground compromise to cover their most long-time loyal customers, but still somewhat screwed a lot of other people who also purchased the cams under the pretense and understanding they’d always have free person detection as had been promoted and such clear up through summer of this year until they made the announcement they were canceling it for all but their oldest customers. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was better than doing what most companies do in such situations…

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As an early adopter, I have purchased 8 Wyze cameras as they were relatively inexpensive and relatively good quality for the price point. A major factor in my decision was the person detection function. No where in the early or even relatively recent product descriptions was there mention that person detection would be a limited time function. In fact even the current product descriptions highlight “motion detection” with the implication that “motion” would naturally include person detection. No product descriptions state specially that person detection would not be a function of the newer models. In my opinion, this is a “bait and switch” scam and therefore constitutes false advertising. I bought the 8 cameras in good faith and feel that the almost $200.00 annual subscription now required is outrageous. I can understand that your earlier business model was flawed, but that is not my problem. You should grandfather early purchasers and continue to include person detection without any incremental charges. In addition, current product descriptions should stipulate that person detection requires a paid subscription.
I shall continue to record my negative reviews to Amazon as well as other sites that advertise Wyze cameras.

If you’re an early adopter then they were offering to let you keep your free person detection if you so chose to have it for free. Why didn’t you just sign up for the service with a $0 amount like so many other early adopters did? It was hard to miss since Wyze practically spammed it non-stop for months in emails and notifications and in the forums and practically everywhere they could to warn all the early adopters to make sure to get it. Being an early adopter, how did you miss that boat, and why are you upset at Wyze if you chose not to sign up for it when they offered to let you and all the other early adopters keep it free?

I mean, just on the V2 cams alone, they were released for Early access. pre-orders way back in February 2018, and instead of only allowing the early adopters (those who ordered in early 2018) to keep free Person Detection, Wyze actually allowed everyone who ordered within the next 19 months to keep it free. That was even way more than just the early adopters, they let a lot of late adopters keep it too. I guess technically the real early adopters all have V1 cams from summer 2017, but since the Free Person Detection was about V2 cam early adopters, that is the first half of 2018. You should’ve definitely qualified if you were one of those early adopters.

Personally, if I were an early adopter like you, and I ordered in 2018, or even a somewhat late adopter in 2019, I would totally contact Wyze Support because they said they might make some exceptions if some of their early adopters missed the sign up deadline.

It’s the rest of really late adopters who got screwed (anyone ordering after Nov 2019 when Wyze announced that XNOR .ai was bought out by Apple and that now they had to revoke that person detection they had previously included. Wyze felt that anyone who ordered after that announcement was made wasn’t eligible to keep PD at Wyze’s expense, and that sucks for all the really late adopters who purchased hoping they’d be able to keep a free option like many of them were led to believe. Those are the people I really feel bad for…the really late adopters who lost their PD and weren’t offered a free way to keep it.

But seriously, if you were an early adopter, I’d totally call Wyze support. Look back through all your emails because I think some of them might have been where it mentioned they might not be super strict on the deadlines or something for those early adopters who were eligible for it. Maybe someone around here can provide an exact reference in the forums or which email it was, but hey, it’s worth a shot if it’s something you otherwise should’ve qualified for and been able to have. Certainly can’t hurt.

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Many thanks for your very detailed comments and suggestions. I admit I was remiss in not signing up for the $0 cost option. My thinking at the time was that I would avoid the hassle of subscribing to something that I didn’t need to because, as a reputable company, Wyze would not rescind the no charge person detection for early adopters with multi-cameras. I was wrong on both counts. Me bad.
I was also mistaken about the purpose of this Forum. I assumed it was sponsored and supported by Wyze as a medium to monitor customer reaction to its products. I didn’t realize the Forum is an independent feedback medium so I commend you and your group for the service you provide. As an apparent subject expert in all things Wyze, do you know of a link to Wyze Support that might be more sympathetic to my plight? I shall try to escalate my issues directly to Wyze.
Once again, thank you for you assistance and service. I shall keep you and the other Forum members informed of my progress to resolve my concerns.

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VS I’m walking around outside right in front of my camera and it never recorded or sends me a notification. But my roommate will walk out there and it will pick them up more often than not… And I’M PAYING for the service! :persevere:

By phone: (206) 339-9646 Available Monday - Friday 5 am - 6 pm PT and Saturday 8 am - 4 pm PT
Or online: Wyze.com/support
I usually recommend by phone, since you definitely get a live person, and it’s always been fast for me. I have heard some people say they’ve had to wait before. I’ve also had good luck with chat the few times I used it, but sometimes it isn’t available. I would definitely not do the email thing, as lots of people never get responded to that way. Phone guarantees you’ll get someone, and if needed, they’ll go ask a supervisor for whatever they don’t know or can’t handle, even if just to ask for help.

I found where Wyze said they wouldn’t be crazy strict on the deadline. It was an email on September 18th, 2020. I received it at 3:57pm MST, it is in the FAQs in that email, FAQ #3:

Why do I have to sign up before October 9?
We want to keep it simple. Having a defined time period that users can join helps us limit risk and accurately measure the results so that we can determine our next steps. We’re not going to be crazy strict on this, contact our support if you miss it by a few days or something.

They might say that 2+ months past the deadline is too long now, but it sure can’t hurt to ask. Afterall, they did suggest that if it is successful then they would consider expanding the offer in some ways:

It hasn’t been a few months yet, so maybe they don’t have enough data to determine if it was successful or not.

I know they did initially extend the deadline because they knew some people like you would wait to try to get the PD offer until after they finally lost access to it. When they first extended it, I commented:

And the employee responded:

I’m sorry to hear of your predicament. Honestly, the best advice anyone can give you is to try to lay it all out to Support and see if they’ll give you an exception due to how you would’ve qualified, but misunderstood or misinterpreted things or whatever the case may be.

And while I’d love to hear an update on how it went, feel free not to update if you feel it could somehow affect you getting an exception. From Wyze’s point of view, if they make an exception for you, and you tell everyone about it, then they’ll immediately have a thousand more people asking for an exception and it would potentially just make things worse for them to where they don’t want to give an exception, ya know? Of course, if they don’t give you an exception, then there’s definitely no reason not to let us know how it went. :slight_smile: Good luck man

Here’s a copy of the email from 9/18/2020 where they said they wouldn’t be crazy strict on the deadline for those who qualify in case it can help you at all while talking to support:

Good luck!

I’m only moderately trying to resist making jokes about being human or having soul while thinking about that Simpson’s episode where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse and now even store doors won’t detect him and open for him…good times, good times…

In all seriousness though, that is weird. One thing I would suggest doing is submitting some of the videos to Wyze to use in training the AI, so that it will better learn that it should be detecting you as a person too.

If you are using legacy person detection, vs Cam Plus, then the most likely explanation is that the camera noticed motion within the 5 minutes before you walked in front of it, so a leaf or plant or bug triggered the motion detection, then within less than 5 minutes of that, you walked in front of the camera and so it didn’t trigger or analyze anything because it happened during the 5 minute cooldown period, and so it misses detecting you. That is the big downside of a cooldown period. You can use detection zones and such to help reduce this issue, but it isn’t perfect either. There are a few other things that could make a difference with this, but the cooldown period is the most common issue.

I hope you get it figured out.

I only have it set up to detect people, not motion. I was out there walking back and forth clearing some things out of the driveway and nothing. :roll_eyes:
Thanks for the reply!

I understand you have it set up to only detect and alert to person, not motion.
It doesn’t matter if you tell it only to alert you to a person, not motion, because of how it works motion will ALWAYS initiate the cooldown period.

The way person detection works is like this:

Your camera detects that a certain number of pixels in its view is suddenly different than the color of pixels that were there 0.0666seconds ago. The camera then flags that recording as worth analyzing/recording and uploads the next 12 seconds of recording to Wyze’s cloud and and AI processing. The AI then looks at the recorded video and compares what it sees with what it has been trained to identify as a person. If it detects a person it then sends an alert back to your phone telling you a person was detected. If it doesn’t detect a person, then it does nothing (it won’t alert you that there was motion) and your camera will now refuse to check any other motion for the next 5 minutes. So if you tell it to only analyze for people, all that means is that it will continue to be triggered for motion, but just won’t tell you about those because you said you only want to be notified for people. But motion will still trigger cloud uploads to Wyze, and then Wyze will refuse to detect anything for the next 5 minutes, meaning, as I said in the previous comment, if a leaf blows by, then 4 minutes later you walk by, Wyze will never alert you that you walked by because the leaf triggered an analysis within the last 5 minutes already. To you, it looks like Wyze isn’t working right because it hasn’t alerted you to a person in a lot longer time frame, maybe you haven’t had a person alert for hours…but the 5 minute cooldown isn’t based on your person notifications like that. It is 100% based on ANY motion, not matter what settings you choose in the app.

If you want to see this for yourself, go into your app, go to events, click on the funnel icon, click “Clear All” to remove all your filters. Click “Show results” and scroll down the list of events. Even though you have told Wyze you only want to know about person detection, you will see it records any motion, and will upload those videos even though you don’t care about them. Any time it does that (any motion at all) it then has a 5 minute limit and will refuse to notify you about any person detected within 5 minutes of ANY other motion.

I hope that clarifies a little.

Now, it is possible that it is also not identifying you correctly. I have some cams that don’t identify me as a person if I am too far away from them (small in the view), at a weird angle, etc. If none of those apply to this, then again, I would recommend finding the cloud video of it (which would’ve still been recorded, but listed as “motion” instead of “person” and submitting it to the AI to recognize you in the future.

It still records all other motion as an event, even if you told it you only want to be alerted about a “person.” Just FYI…that is probably where your confusion came from.

But, you’d think if you were walking back and forth in the camera view for more than 5 minutes, it should’ve noticed at least one of those times…

Actually I had looked at this too, as I have NO filters set up on the events page. So I see motion events as well as people and there was nothing for some time before I was walking all over the driveway for over 5 minutes. So seems like this is just “hit and miss” technology.

That also is strange what you are stating as I have multiple videos less than 5 minutes apart all the time. So if it “blocks it out” for 5 minutes, how am I getting multiple recordings in that duration?

This is also strange as it detects my room mate in the same area - and I am a bigger target!! lol

Thanks again.

That is some good clarification. (all of this is assuming you don’t have cam plus too) Yes, if your camera is covering the driveway, and it doesn’t detect you as a person when you were walking there for over 5 minutes, and during different times your roommate is detected in the same location, then that sounds a little strange. I have never had any problems anywhere close to that. If you and your roommate are both on screen at the same time, then the camera doesn’t distinguish between multiple people.

As for why you could get multiple videos less than 5 minutes apart, that likely has to do with motion vs sound events. When motion is triggered, it requires a 5 minute cooldown before it will record any other motion event, even a person. BUT if it hears sound within that same 5 minute period, it may upload a “sound event” even though it hasn’t been 5 minutes yet. Also, there are loopholes like using a motion or contact sensor to force it to upload a video to the cloud every time those are triggered, and those get labeled as an “Automation” event (I used to do this for my front porch to bypass the 5 minute cooldown limit).

If you are getting multiple “Motion” or “Person” events within a 5 minute period, then you must have cam plus active, maybe even just as a 14 day trial, otherwise, there is something very abnormal going on. Very improbable.

Who knows. Hopefully the AI gets better soon. they are training it more and more every day. I personally submit lots of videos for them to use, and I’ve seen significant improvement in detection accuracy. My main problem is that the AI keeps reporting my cats as people, so when a cat sits on the back porch I keep getting an announcement over and over and over again “Person detected on Backdoor cam”…hopefully they figure that out soon! I submit basically all of those and tell them it is a pet, not a person…no matter how much the cats themselves think they are people…

Sound detection is turned off everywhere. Sorry yes I’m paying for the person detection offered not camplus.

Lol I never really thought of sending them a blank video and saying I was there why didn’t it record it LOL but I am cracking up at your comment about the cats :cat:. You know they own that house, they just let you live there! :wink:
Yeah I hope it gets better at the cost of $20 I wouldn’t mind replacing and them in the future if need be, not prefered, as I have not had them terribly long… But, matter of fact I was already thinking about replacing a couple because I bought them before they had the black and I would prefer that in a couple spots.
Thanks again for your input! Have a great weekend! :grin::+1:

As early adopter, I received those mails and signed up, but never got the functionallity. Very disappointing.

I’m on the latest firmware and this is happening on all my cams

I have the same problem…reported it and the techs keep asking for camera setup data…last conversation on email notified them it’s not in the camera as all my pan scan and v3’s do it

Yes all my camera doing it since last week. I did a post here about it and submitted the videos.

I am having same issue, it shows motion detected, but not that it was a person

Wyze did a bait and switch this fall. Originally person detection was included with the cameras. I bought 8 on this basis. This fall they decided that the person detection function would require a subscription. While Wyze initially offered the opportunity to pick your own subscription rate, I assumed ( wrongly) that present owners would be grandfathered. Now I only have motion detection and no person detection. Very disappointed and dissatisfied.

Richard C Dubuc
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They did grandfather in people for person detection. I talked with support and they recommend I turn off person detection, and turn it back on. It seems to be functioning at this moment. but I guess I need to wait and see. I have four cameras in the front, and at the last detection, only one camera showed person detection, while the other three did not even report anything

Thank you. I shall try turning person detection off and back on to see if it makes any difference. I shall report back if it works/doesn’t work.

Richard C Dubuc
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