Alexa Person detection announcements with wyze cameras

I have a Fire tablet sitting on my desk. Today I timed the lag between my wife leaving the driveway and it showing on the tsblet. 24 seconds. The same when she returned. That’s just the app showing the motion. Not the 12 second clip and the time to process Person Detection. :slightly_smiling_face:

Well , maybe Cam plus doesn’t make any difference , it takes me less than 24 seconds by the time I walk in front of that camera and get in the house

My understanding was that the app doesn’t show anything about the event until after it’s uploaded and processed (including PD CMC CP BBQ WTF IMOK UROK).

Ah, that would make sense, I guess.

If you open up the event tab, trigger a camera and immediately swipe down on the event page the event shows up (in a second or two) but if you try to view it you will get an error. When it’s done uploading/processing the notification comes. That’s how it’s always worked for me on Android at least.

1 Like

Great then I stand corrected, thanks. (This does make it less excusable how long notifications take.)

It would mean this wishlist request should be trivial to satisfy and greatly increase the usefulness of the camera:

That’s how it works for me also

1 Like

My personal theory as to why there is a delay for the notifications is that they don’t want people trying to connect/enter a cameras livestream while it is recording/transmitting. Maybe due to some sort of hardware limitation, the event or camera could fail. I know there have been a few cases where I have been trying to look through the playback on an SD card and the camera freezes. Whenever I manage to reconnect to the frozen camera there will be gap in the continuous recording from when the camera froze.

3 Likes

I didnt know about the annoucement feature on my Wyze Cams.

I have a Wyze Pan Cam, 3 Wyze cam v2s.

2 of the v2s have the person announce feature and 1 doesnt, also the wyze pan cam doesnt.

I have deleted the wyze skill rediscovered and they still dont have the person detection skill and its turned on on call cams.

I am not sure how to make this work on my outdoor v2 which is the main one I want this feature for.

Any ideas? See screenshots.

Kitchen Camera (v2) has the announcement feature which is great, but Master cam (pan cam) and Outdoor Cam (v2), all on latest firmware are missing the feature… why?

cj

That’s not right , you should remove those devices from the Alexa app that don’t have that function , then you can have Alexa discover devices again

I’ve got the same issue. I have 8 cameras, 4 work with Alexa, 4 don’t.
I’ve removed / added the skill. Removed / added the cameras. Nothing has fixed it.

Well that sucks but I’m not sure that function is actually out of beta yet , is it?
Maybe it is I don’t remember

i did that before but did it again. Deleted those cams in Alexa app. Cams discovered again but without the person announcements again. just those 2 cams. ugh. so weird

that doesn’t make a lot of sense… I could always switch a car in my house that has that feature i guess and make it the one pointing outside but i shouldn’t have to do all that.

Just to belabor the point, did both of you say “Alexa, Discover” after re-adding the cameras and skill? That did the trick for me the first time I wanted to enable the announcements.

See also

I believe this may be related to another issue which I’m experiencing which is some wyze cam feeds are not being accessible on my Echo Show devices when I ask “Alexa, show me [camera name]…” The workaround someone discovered is to go into the Wyze app and rename the cameras that are not being accessible. Once renamed, go into the Alexa app and delete that camera and get Alexa to rediscover the camera. Once it is re-added, that camera’s device settings will have the Announcements tab.

However, this is only a temporary workaround as after a day or so, the device settings will no longer show the Announcements tab again (and the camera will no longer be accessible from the Echo Show device).

There is another thread that has more info and a response from Wyze’s development team:

Is there supposed to be a difference between saying “Discover” and tapping Discover?
I get the same result either way. The camera is added but still no announcement capabilities.
I’ve tried removing cameras from Alexa, renaming in WYZE and Discovering in Alexa. No announcements.
Oddly, the cameras that Alexa can’t announce Person Detection with are the 4 that have Person Detection enabled in WYZE.
I’ve tried disableing PD, no change in Alexa.

I don’t think so; but I just didn’t originally know where they hid Discover in the app.

A data point, I see the feature is enabled on a camera in my account that has been physically powered OFF since BEFORE I enabled the feature… So it is not hardware/firmware dependent at all, at least for me.

There’s gotta be some recipe of special incantations that will get yours working…

Since 75% of the People detected at my front door are my dog I’m not too disappointed that Alexa isn’t announcing it. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I just deleted all my Wyze devices from Alexa, disabled Wyze integration and then re-enabled, linked and discovered my devices. Two out of seven cameras are missing the PD settings page. Can’t see anything different about the two non-working cameras. All are running RTSP firmware.