California fires: smart speakers and emergency alerts

Fri Oct 13 23:31:09 UTC 2017

I know with Alexa products they just ask you for a postal code for weather
updates.  Probably covers 99 percent of cases.

On Oct 13, 2017 4:26 PM, "Andreas Ott" <andreas at naund.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 04:59:17PM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
> > Has anyone heard if the smart speaker companies (Amazon Echo, Google
> Home)
> > plan to include emergency alert capability?  An estimate 10% of
> households
> > own a smart speaker, and Gartner (well-known for its forecasting
> > accuracy) predicts 75% of US households will have a smart speaker by
> 2020.
>
> How is geolocation achieved on these in-home devices? Is that tied to
> the ~80% accuracy of general purpose IP geolocation? Do they have GPS?
> Or is this done via account data in case it contains a street location?
>
> This is different from alerts to cellphones "tethered" to a tower where
> you get a better location info, even for E911 (exclude corner cases
> where you are on a "mountain" top overlooking silicon Valley and lock
> onto a tower further away). There you are effectively sending the alert
> to the tower at a certain location and it multicasts it out to the phones
> that are attached to it.
>
> -andreas
>