New Wyze firmware due in January – Highlights

In an email sent to all current Wyze owners, the company explained that a partnership with XNOR.AI was coming to an end. The Artificial Intelligence company XNOR.AI was responsible for all object recognition for Wyze cameras. Specifically, the edge based AI that was used to detect people from animals and other in frame movement.

According to the email, the technology was leased and had a clause in the lease that stated it could be terminated at any time. That is the route that XNOR.AI took when they broke their partnership with Wyze. It’s unclear from the announcement why XNOR.AI decided to terminate the lease agreement though.

The result of this termination means Wyze will be releasing a new firmware update that will remove the AI algorithms and remove the person detection from the units in production.

For the end user, you have 2 options. Continue with the plan to upgrade and lose the feature or deny the upgrade and continue to run the software. Since these were edge algorithms built into the firmware with no cloud dependency, all processing and detection happens on the device so as long as the firmware is not upgraded, it should continue to work.

Wyze is currently working to develop in house AI that could be release end of 2020 to replace the lost functionality.

What are you going to do? Let us know in the comments of the video below.

Happy Upgrading (or not!)
–Carlo