We’re Giving Wyze Person Detection to All Users at Whatever Price You Want - 1/11/22

Instead of completely doing away with cloud storage at the free tier, what about setting a rolling 24 or 48 hour expiration instead of 14 days? Or for those that have paid for Lite or Plus, the ability to manually reduce the recording retention?

I get way too many of those unwanted bugs / blowing trees notifications that don’t need to be using up cloud storage. I used to delete them all, but that ended up being a time sink and I gave up. I wouldn’t mind having some cloud storage though for those recordings that contain actual content that I want to review - and that provides a safety net incase of theft (in which case an SD card isn’t going to help much).

That’s a great idea for addressing the objection I raised about those who will only discover this new setup after they go to check for footage of a burglary etc.

I wonder what the cost issue really is? The storage space used or the processing of every uploaded clip?

It would be a combination of both I suppose but one must be more of a burden.

AI processing by far, which is why I thought this would never happen.

Quite likely but the free tier (without Cam Plus / Lite) shouldn’t have much, if any, AI processing. So in that case it should pretty much just be the cost of storage.

I had Legacy Person Detection activated on all cams and the app says they made the transition to Cam Plus Lite.

However…

The person detection performance is markedly different post-transition: fewer persons detected (ie, more missed detections.)

So my question is…

Was Legacy Person Detection a system distinct from Cam Plus for purposes of person detection? Or was it just a subset of Cam Plus (in which case one wouldn’t expect any performance difference after the transition)?

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I have the same question @peepeep.

I’m not sure this move would lower the processing costs. I suspect Wyze will be processing more person detection but maybe not. I wonder how many people don’t even realize yet that their clips are being stored. @Customer hinted at this.

Gonna have some angry folks when they find out their promised 14 day rolling cloud storage has been taken away. Lots of people don’t read the forum, Reddit, Facebook or subscribe to email. Surprise! Someone broke into your car and you can’t see who it was. :slight_smile:

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Yep it’s going to be a real problem burning up their support lines in a month or two. I hope that is anticipated as part of this plan.

I agree with this approach too. For me, all I really care about for recording is the AI events, provided those are accurate. The email announcing Cam Plus Light seemed to indicate the unsustainable cost to Wyze was the retention.

So I would suggest always doing the AI processing mainly to categorize the events to avoid having to store them all. The real idea is to let the user tier determine the retention policy. This is good for Wyze to save storage $ and good for users to have less noise to look through.

For example:

Free: retain 12 second clips with AI labeled persons for 7 days on local SD card, with the 5 min cool down period. Retain motion only for 24 hrs so users can report on missed detections or false alarms, so that the AI processing can get better. The better it gets, the less cost for retention.

Paid Lite: retain 12 second clips with any AI labeled events (person, vehicle, pet, package) for 30 days in the cloud, with no cooldown. Retain motion events for 7 days, mainly to allow users to classify and make AI better.

Paid Full: (longer clips, more detection types) retain up to 5 min clips with AI labeled events (adding friendly face, and any newly developed detections) for 30 days in the cloud, with no cooldown. Retain motion events for the same 7 days to make AI better with user labeling.

Maybe more of this can be done on the camera, perhaps dedicating the cooldown period to avoid uploading and some of the processing cost for the free tier? Not sure if this is possible, but a challenge to Wyze to find a way. Having more storage locally helps too, so keep that as an enabler to further reduce costs and make what the user gets better if they load up with an SD card. It’s a perfect tradeoff for the user.

Hope this is helpful or at least spur further thought and ideas.

The fact of the matter is I don’t much give a poop about cloud storage especially when it’s inaccessible

I would rather have on card storage like we do the SD cards with full accessibility via software

I understand people buy these cameras for remote applications where they can’t necessarily go up and pull the card out to read on a PCb or their account maybe unable to access their home network for one reason or another

For those folks I can appreciate their desire to have iCloud storage or some kind of cloud storage

But if you could access the cameras on the Internet just like you do email and then download your SD card contents that would certainly solve a lot of problems and would take the burden of storage away from Wyze which would certainly lower their operating cost and their dependency on Amazon and their servers mainly AWS which is down often.

I may be talking about pie in the sky but in the world today technology is capable of so much more I hope that they will investigate the possibilities of incorporating some of those features.

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Speculation:

Legacy Person Detection (LPD) WAS a system distinct from Cam Plus AI.

The bulk of my clips are at night, with poor lighting, at a distance. Most persons appear as fuzzy silhouettes. Maybe not ideal for person detection.

Perhaps LPD AI was better trained to distinguish these poor candidates than Cam Plus AI currently is. Or perhaps Cam Plus AI is designed to reject candidates below a certain quality threshold.

Or whatever. I’m losing my will to care. :slight_smile:

End speculation.

That summarizes a LOT of things and not just in this forum.

I haven’t noticed much if any difference in the quality or frequency of legacy level person detection. I don’t believe there was ever a separate service.

Rank speculation, then. :slight_smile:

So, it goes like this. Given my ‘use case’ I had very little right to expect any great shakes person detection. So I didn’t. Accepted what I got. And found a way to make it useful to me.

Now it seems I’ve lost what I’ve had, a stable known quantity, and am presented with another riddle I don’t care enough to try to solve anymore.

Ergo, whatever, meh, [insert a graceful dive into a placid pool]…

…or this


 

 
Yep. What does the perpetual optimist say?

Something. Always something.

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IS WYZE still offering the $99 per year Option for CAM PLUS for up to 99 cameras? If so, I want to subscribe

I can confirm that Legacy Person Detection (i.e. the previous run of Name Your Price) used the same Wyze AI for Person Detection as Cam Plus/Lite/Pro. It does receive monthly updates, though, so if it seems to not be serving your use case very well right now please make sure to submit your videos via “Submit this one video to Wyze” when viewing them. :slight_smile:

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When submitting a video, can it help train the individual user’s circumstance or is to train the whole system?

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@MtnMan
The videos train the whole system in general not just the individual user.

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for how long is Wyze going to be giving away free Cam Plus Lite? In 6mo or 18mo it it going to be required that the Lite plans upgrade to the Standard Cam Plus Plan? I’m looking for the reason for this and it’s the only one I can come up with. Get us hooked on people detection then say it’s going away again unless you get the Plus. Just like the FAILED Android app roll out was supposed to get the free folks to convert and let the one that didn’t want to just fall away. I don’t think for 1 minuite that the App upgrade was any kind of mistake at all, But Wyze didn’t realize how vocal it’s users would be. And how the bad press about it would help kill them off for good. It was somebody’s bad plan to get everyoen to convert to Plus, And Boy was it an EPIC FAIL.

Thanks for the confirmation, Jimmy. :slight_smile:

@tslynch4
The last version of the ‘pay what you want’ plan never switched to forcing a payment. They even said if it worked they would look at adding more cams to it. That is exactly what Cam Plus Lite does it adds for instance the v3 to get person detection at a ‘pay what you want’ plan. It also allows users who were not eligible to sign up for Legacy Person Detection or didn’t for whatever reason the ability to sign up now.

I am not sure what Android app roll out you are referring to.

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