California fires: smart speakers and emergency alerts

[sean at donelan.com (Sean Donelan)]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018, Lou Katz wrote:
>> The NEST guys also didn't seem very receptive to the emergency alert stuff
>> when I contacted them.
>
> And the NEST folk say there is NO WAY that you will ever be able to connect
> to your own servers rather than theirs.

For the same reason I don't think Netflix and Spotify is the right place
for emergency alerts, but I do think emergency alerts should be part of 
your smart TV and smart speakers.  Or more precisely, part of the 
intelligent assistant that controls those smart devices.

Although NEST is being re-absorbed back into Google, I also agree with the 
NEST people as far as as their old approach that not part of individual IoT 
devices. NEST products are mostly "sensor" things. The individual 
sensors do a single thing, i.e. doorbell, thermostat, etc. Its the 
"intelligent assistant" that you interact with, through smart TVs 
and smart speakers, which makes the whole thing "smart." So, not part of 
the NEST products, but emergency warnings should be part of Google 
Assistant and the Google Home ecosystem.

Product managers love the word ecosystem.

Several people have told me about Amazon message notifications. Yes, 
that is correct. Notifications were added last year. However, Amazon's 
view of notifications is similar to voice mail message waiting lights. 
Amazon's user guidelines (really requirements) for notifications are meant 
to be an unobtrusive light and chime, like old-fashion message waiting on 
answering machines, not to wake you up.

Amazon also has an alarm clock function that is designed to wake you 
up to music or a news report at a specific time; but third-party apps 
can't use that to set event-driven alarms. Third-party apps aren't allowed 
to fake it, and set an alarm clock timer for 1 second from now. Only 
Amazon's Alexa can directly set alarm timers. If you knew the tornado was 
going to strike your house at 3:42am before you went to bed, why would you 
need an emergency notification to wake you up?

Several weather companies have had discussions about how to improve severe 
weather warnings with products in the Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. 
ecosystems for at least a year, likely longer. Amazon, Apple, Google and 
Microsoft just need to search their BizDev files for find them.

I get companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft want to control 
the user experience with their intelligent assistants. They want to 
control unsolicited commercials for "Pizza's On Its Way" at 110db at 
3am and potentially driving consumers away from their products with a bad 
user experiences.  One way to control that, is by making emergency 
warnings part of the base infrastructure under their control instead of 
random third-party apps using APIs in all sorts of undesirable 
ways. Third-parties weather apps could still provide "value added" 
enhancements.


>> Capitalist solution: Build yet another IoT device that just does emergency
>> alerting.
>>
>> Someone with free time should start a kickstarter or something.  I'd
>> totally chip in.

Capitalism has proven time and again to suck at public safety issues. Most 
safety laws are passed after stupid acts of capitalism, i.e. saving a 
penny and shocking deaths.  Its not always as obvious as chaining exit 
doors closed in night clubs or disabling automotive safety features while 
testing self-driving cars on public streets.

Last fall, AT&T had a single fiber line in Northern California. AT&T 
wouldn't install a second fiber route, because of captalism.  The local 
communities paid to subsidize a second fiber line, but AT&T refused to 
use a competitor fiber to provide a backup fiber route.  Guess what 
happened during the wildfires last fall? The lone AT&T fiber was damaged, 
and all AT&T service, AT&T cell towers, AT&T internet, etc. went down 
throughout the region during the wildfires.

The Cable Act of 1992, which requires cable companies provide emergency 
announcements on all channels, was passed after large number of tornado 
deaths occurred in towns where the local cable companies didn't broadcast 
weather warnings on cable channels. Survivors reported that they were 
watching cable TV, and didn't know a tornado was about to destroy their 
neighborhood.

The Warning, Alert and Response Network Act of 2006, which created the 
mobile cell phone warning system in the U.S., was passed after Hurricane 
Katrina. The post-Katrina reports didn't necessarily identify specific 
problems with mobile phones during Katrina, but more general challenges 
reaching vulnerable populations during emergencies resulted in lots of 
changes.

Apple iOS and Google Android implemented a bare bones cell phone 
alerting, with the worst cell phone user interface, only after the WARN 
act was passed. Those companies are well-known for their user interface 
psychologists and testing. Why does their cell phone alert user interface 
suck so bad? You would expect them to collect lots of analytics about its 
performance and improvements.

But that's not how capitalism works for safety/compliance features.