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