Alexa Wyze Skill for Outside North America

@oviazcan… I want to clarify that I am not a Wyze employee. I am a fellow user who volunteers to help moderate the forum.

That said, Wyze has in fact told Amazon to stop selling the cameras outside the US. Amazon will not comply. As @WyzeJasonJ says, Wyze could pull their products from Amazon completely, but that would not be a good move for them.

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@deuse… If Amazon is using the same product description that Wyze provides everywhere, then perhaps Wyze could add a note to the description where it says “works with Alexa” to include “only in the US”. That might solve the description issue if Amazon is propagating the same description worldwide.

I’ll pass that along to Wyze so they can consider.

Ok Loki, I can understand it is not a good move for sales objectives in the short run, but the brand value is plummeting radically in international terms. What the international clients really want is to have the skill activated and I don’t think is too much to ask. Cloud and server scalability is a must have for startups like Wyze and server latency internationally is something that can be activated with a switch if it was planned correctly since the beginning.

El El jue, 15 de agosto de 2019 a la(s) 7:45, Loki via Wyze Community wyze@discoursemail.com escribió:

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Interesting reading, for sure.

I just got a pack of the new bulbs in the uk and was a little dismayed to learn they don’t work with Alexa here.

Surely this is just a case of enabling this worldwide. Or is there a charge for this from Amazon or some other licensing reason why this can’t be done yet?

In any case, I love your guys kit. But please make it work properly in the uk :uk:

Thanks

The only thing that fits the picture is that Wyze will have to pay Amazon for letting everyone world wide use the Wyze skill.

I can’t think of any other reason.

Thoughts?

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Let me explain a little bit how things works behind the scene from a technical point of view so that hopefully you can better understand why this is not working and the challenge that we have associated. I will omit completely the fact that Wyze is officially only supported in the USA.

Here are a few grounding facts:

  • Wyze operates, at this point, a single cloud based entirely in the USA. We do not have any server located outside the USA. A location where all the services/servers are located are generally referred as a stack.
  • Wyze Partners are serving Wyze requests through servers in North America.
  • All Wyze devices have in their firmware that they need to talk to the North American stack.
  • Alexa is available in multiple countries including, but not limited to, USA, Canada, Japan, UK, France, India…
  • Alexa servers for USA, Canada and Japan are in the USA. Servers for UK, France and India are based in in Ireland.
  • Alexa requires in order to get the WWA (Work with Alexa) certification that the latency of all operations be within a certain range.

Having those facts established. Let’s see what they translate into…

Based on the location of the Alexa device, each time a user is asking Alexa to do something, the requests is going straight to the servers that are associated with those countries. The devices know exactly which server to use because the firmware is specific to the country.
So first, we would have to deploy a skill for every server location that Alexa is supporting. This is not something that we are supporting for the moment and would need to change our deployments to account for that.
Then the skill, based on the current implementation, would have to make calls directly to the US. The problem is we know that the latency is too high to get the official Works With Alexa certification.
The only solution is for Wyze to duplicate all our servers from the US stacks into the European stacks and any other place where Alexa is available.
But now that we have all the servers duplicated, then we also have to go change all the firmwares and software (mobile app) to be aware of those servers and being able to select automatically the proper server sets based on the location the device is in. We also have to align all our partners to make sure that the traffic for them is also contained within a specific region.

This is overall increasing the complexity of the infrastructure, the complexity of the development, the complexity of the deployments, the complexity of quality control to make sure that we don’t have regional variation.
We can handle complexity, it means slowing down the pace at which we are releasing new features but it also means a significant increase in costs and we can’t justify that cost today to just enable Alexa (or Google Home) for non North American countries.

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Thanks for this info. This is really interesting to learn and having these facts has explained things fully.

I may as well tell you that I work for a UK telecoms company and we have 30+ data centres in the UK. So let me know if I can help at all.

Thanks again.

Dave

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Thank you for replying to this. It speaks well of your company not to ignore our frustration.

I do believe that the increased complexity and cost would be offset by the increase in volume, that allows for reduced raw material cost by using economies of scale. But who am I to tell you how to run your business?

At least please make sure Amazon modifies the description internationally, there is a formal process for that. Nevertheless, It is still too frustrating to know that you don’t even have it in your roadmap. If this is the case for Alexa I won’t even dare to ask for Homekit support!

Don’t mind my rant! I am just too disappointed because I thought your company would revolutionize our tech culture globally, not just in the USA.

PS. My personal VPN service has less latency when connecting to USA servers than Mexican servers, which are just a few blocks away from me. Maybe you could try to deploy the service in Mexico through USA servers?

Great reply! but, I’m using wyze cam v2 with google assistant and just work great here in Spain ( Europe).

Try something simple, translate the skill for all Alexa’s skills store and publish it, it will work for sure using US servers.

Thank you for you great work, I really like your devices and concept. Long time testing cams and I must say yours is one of the best.

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Yeah, I would rather have a little lag than no voice control!

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I have recently purchased a couple of Pan cams and a new V2 Wyzecam for use in the UK (Purchased from Amazon.com only £12 import fees). I understand the skills have been created and there is a server issue to be resolved with Amazon, but here’s my wish for the Alexa skills to be enabled in the UK\Europe.

Another customer in Spain that loves Wyze but sad not to have full functionality, specially Alexa.

Thanks!
PS - I would volunteer if you need testers or assistance from Spain

Like many people I purchased my Wyze Cams from Amazon.com and they were delivered to the UK. Having the Alexa Skill in Europe would be great and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t require much effort from Wyze to do this, maybe some investment but I’m sure they’d recoup that quickly…

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I am from Mexico and got my Wyze in Canada. I recently moved to Mexico and i could not find the Alexa skill in Mexico. I would like to know how to get it.
Please advise.
Thanks

Change you Amazon account to American

I’m sorry to disappoint you but Wyze believes Alexa control is only relevant in the USA.

El El mié, 25 de septiembre de 2019 a la(s) 12:40, yorch_castillo via Wyze Community wyze@discoursemail.com escribió:

Alexa skill not available on the México Amazon skill store

Welcome to the community, @ivanngv. I have moved your topic to this #wishlist thread. You can vote for it at the top-left. :slight_smile:

because the Canada skill topic did not move to the Support topic?

Alexa skill not available on the Canadian Alexa skill store