Whatever, not interested in burglars. I could've used that thing to check basic status of the apartment that I don't use. Broken windows, water leaks and stuff.
Turns out that security is a euphemism for "observation & reporting." Use cases span a host of shared services: Traditional Security, Employee Health & Safety, Facilities Management (e.g. leaks & spills), Customer Service, and others. Breaking & Enterings do happen, but they are rare. Facilities incidents such as the ones you mentioned are vastly more common.
* We are exclusively indoors at this time.
* We're the only indoor provider that can manage doors & elevators.
* We have 2-way video in addition to 2-way audio.
* We provide a comprehensive service: hardware, software, service & maintenance, and remote monitoring.
* We manage multiple, redundant 24/7 command centers, with operators speaking dozens of languages.
* We have SOC2 certifications & deal with GDPR - shockingly, no other providers are SOC2 certified.
* We offer rich applications on the robot's screen, including visitor management, forms, etc.
* We can perform COVID-related features, such as elevated temperature screening using FLIR cameras, promoting social distancing, and enforcing PPE.
* We support international operations too.
But even if you could manually control the device, I'd be too afraid of having Amazon capturing full video of all my belongings. They have the resources to easily hook up the feed to an object detection ETL or some other AI system to extract a ton of information about the owners, and then sell that as specialized advertising intelligence. All of a sudden my mailbox fills up with lots of high focused ads.
OK I realize that's probably going down the conspiracy theory path a little much :), but I don't think it's too far off.
I just bought a power washer. I bought it on Amazon. Amazon easily knows I now own a power washer. And yet Amazon is giving me a ton of recommendations for power washers.
This is a constant problem with recommendations and everyone I know has the same experience.
And unless there's some sort of data regulation preventing them from applying my purchase history to their recommendations it's ridiculously easy to fix. Tag item categories as "1 per household over x months" and when someone purchase amount goes beyond the threshold stop recommending products from that category until x months has passed.
I have a pretty good hunch that these companies often do stupid stuff like this.
For some reason, both Comcast and Verizon also have my address as a variant on my real postal service address that hasn't been true since before I moved here over 20 years ago.
I assume that manually tagging certain types of items with a flag that means "The buyer is unlikely to buy another item in this category within a meaningful timeframe no matter how often we recommend it" is more effort than the recommendation slot is worth. There are probably a number of flags one could imagine setting but it's likely very hard to automate because it requires understanding how people use/consume/upgrade/etc. a given item.
Seriously: I haven't put in a camera because my DSL craps out every month or so and requires a hard modem reboot to reconnect, which seems like a lot to ask from the friend who checks my mail.
I would love to see a solution tailored to people not in their domiciles, but I don't feel like this is it.
This announcement (not yet a product!) is for people who really need to look around the places they're going to return to in a day or two anyway, max. Maybe that's a market; it's not me.
I think the majority of people aren't very good at flying drones. Even outside, it can take a lot of practice.
People don't want to spend hours or days learning how to fly a drone in their homes. They want stuff to just work.
I crashed and broke my VTOL airplane twice last weekend. Sighs dramatically. Pilot error.
More seriously, there's a couple main issues: piloting, and recharging.
You'd want the drone to not crash into anything, and remote controlling the drone with Internet-induced lag would be especially challenging. There's a reason why FPV setups for race drones use analog video still.
Also, just as with making a household wheeled security robot, you can do that right now, but the automatic return to the charging base is not widely available as a commercial product.
But I want a product, not tinkering. The appeal of this isn’t just what it does but that it does it right after I unpack it. I want it to fly by itself using some wizardry that a person at a huge company cooked up. I just don’t want it to phone home to do it.
That’s what I want in the “standalone” one too. Mass market product appeal. No tinkering.
Maybe there is a better product though.