Person Detection Update: A New Experiment for Premium Features

Are you doing this with the indoor 2K cams? I have 3 of them to use for person detection, but I can’t figure out how to get the facial recognition to work on them, as if it only works on the other cams or with the base or something. So frustrating. I’d appreciate any advice for this since I am very interested.

I guess my doubts for them ever offering PD by itself at a set rate are due to the official FAQ not actually listing that as a solution they’re considering:

What if volunteer contributions don’t cover the cost? What will happen to Person Detection for 12-second Event videos?

We don’t know yet. We are going to evaluate the results of this experiment after a few months and see if we have enough contributions to at least subsidize the cost. If it doesn’t work, we will come up with a new plan, but it is possible that free 12-second person detection will be discontinued.

That’s the main reason I think they’d just discontinue it and tell everyone to get cam plus instead. I just went and got Eufy Cams instead for the locations I needed reliable local PD without a cool down. Again, would really appreciate it if you gave me an idea of how you got the facial recognition to work!

I use the Facial Recognition with HomeKit. And so far it works with the Indoor and Outdoor cams. The built in face detection is in beta and will be available soon.

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Ah thanks, no wonder I couldn’t figure it out. It was driving me crazy! It kept saying it had it, but there was no way to do it.

Ah, just looked at the device support details and it appears the Eufy 2K only have facial detection, but not facial recognition. So they first detect motion, then they check to see if it is a person or pet, if it thinks it’s a person it then goes on to detect if there is a face. Some models will then go on to do recognition of known faces and tell you who the person is, but apparently the indoor 2K does not support this, but hopefully that part of it is just in beta for these cams. Wish Wyze would do all this with their V3’s. If the leak was right, we’ll know by mid next week.

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Or just use HomeKit. :innocent: Face recognition works just fine on the 2K cameras right now.

That’s simply not true for person detection.

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I would if I had any Apple products at all.

Though, they did show up on Home Assistant saying they were available because of HomeKit, I didn’t figure out how to activate them that way, though it worked for other homekit products (Ecobee for example). I don’t understand much about HomeKit, but it almost seems like if Home Assistant said I could connect to them because they had homekit compatibility, I am curious to look into seeing if there is a way to use homekit somehow despite not having any apple devices.

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Truth. For PD the clip must be sent to the cloud.

But it’s NOT about how many people signed up! It’s entirely about the RATIO of paying customers and how much they paid. Remember, they are turning PD completely OFF for legacy customers who do NOT respond to the offer. So non-responders are NOT costing Wyze anything. So the reason for any offer extension remains unclear…

That’s not how I understand it at all.

Well that’s the plan. That’s why there was a deadline to sign up. If you don’t take advantage of the offer you lose Person Detection. That was the whole point. They never said that if you didn’t respond you got to keep PD anyway. To the contrary.

This is a GREAT point actually. Those who responded early were able to easily choose $0 if we wanted with no issues at all. Later they made it harder, and now that it’s past the original deadline it is much more complicated. Maybe now that it’s after the deadline to choose your own price with no limits, they should allow some of those already qualified people who missed the deadline to still sign up, but not give them the $0 option anymore since that boat sailed. That’s one way to handle it…tell people sorry they missed it, we don’t want to force you onto CamPlus for each camera, so we’ll allow you to sign up, but now signups only allow a certain minimum. They could even extend this to newer people with a higher minimum.

Maintaining a PD only option at $1.50 (their break even) or $2.00 and have it continue to cover all cameras on an account sounds like a great idea, although of course it would severely affect CamPlus sales. Seems unlikely.

Maybe, but it’s a slightly different customer profile. The PD only feature is mostly to keep some people from going elsewhere for PD like many of us already have. I will never pay for Cam Plus for all my cams (don’t care about cloud benefits), but I would pay a little for PD, and I might consider paying for it for my VDB and perhaps select few devices, but never Misty of them). Taking away PD won’t convince me to get CamPlus on all my cams, it would just push me to invest father into Eufy’s ecosystem and Wyze will lose more money in the long-run as I feel it’s better to get more Eufy stuff over time because Wyze isn’t meeting my needs…

Standalone PD isn’t in huge competition for CamPlus imo as it’s mostly for people who wouldn’t get CamPlus anyway, but will help satisfy people enough to stay.

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Question on the subscription billing. I signed up for PD detection under the name-your-price model (before the deadline), I put it as $0 for now but I may be inclined to change this if things work well/less buggy.

When I login to services.wyze.com, the PD detection shows up correctly as one of my subscriptions (under my Camplus one). But when I click Edit, it shows ‘Current Monthly Total: $1.48’ which is not the amount I had set. Anyone experience this? Is it going to charge me this price, rather than my named amount? TIA

Current monthly total is whatever you currently have selected in the Edit screen not the amount you are currently paying.

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My point was that contrary to what you were saying this was meant to be rolled out to ALL users. Provided of course the model worked which is doubtful.

We emailed 1.3M telling them Person Detection would be free, but we are going to make this available to all Wyze users that created an account before Nov 26, 2019, the date the email was sent. If we can successfully cover the costs of Person Detection for these users, we may roll this out to all users and maybe even into other features like Cam Plus

PD in some form or another has to remain available. What the costs will be will determine if it’s viable.

Right now frankly it sucks functionally so I don’t see how Wyze succeeds going forward as their customer base is not going to pay for services that don’t work. At least not enough of them to sustain the company.

And “the model worked” meant if the ratio, the amount of money raised ONLY by responders were high enough. Again, they were very clear that non-responders LOSE existing PD, so those non-responders stop costing Wyze money. Here are e-mail excerpts.

PD has been working quite well for me (although the cameras have started needed regular rebooting).

I understand that. You are still missing my point. So at this point I would say it’s best to agree neither of us is comprehending the other. It is honestly no big deal. I truly don’t see Wyze surviving long term.

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I thought they just hired a Finance guy? Must be Alfred E. Neuman from ‘Mad magazine’. Never, and I mean NEVER should a subscription plan be this convoluted… It’s no wonder people are bailing out and selling their Wyze and Company products… This is like an on-line comedy show.

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