Once upon a time, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> said:
After wildfires killed 40+ people in northern California last fall, I asked if Amazon and Google had any plans to include emergency alerts in their smart speaker/intelligent assistant products. Smart speakers seem like a way to alert people to imminent life-threatening danger during the night when they may be asleep or not aware of it.
My biggest concern is them making such alerts mandatory. At a minimum they should be opt-out; a one-time notice during setup (or when the functionality is added) to allow opt-in would be better IMHO. You don't know what I might be streaming on that speaker; could be I'm listening to scanner traffic from storm spotters for example. I have been closely watching local TV station radar coverage of a radar-indicated tornado heading towards my home when the cable system takes over my TiVo to play the NWS tornado warning message. That takes a couple of minutes minutes, during which changing the channel is disabled (and there's no way to opt out of such cable-sent alerts). This is highly counter-productive; it just means that now I know when there's dangerous weather headed towards my home, I cannot use TV for tracking it unless I get out an antenna-fed portable TV. -- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>