Announcing Upgraded Motion and Crowd Alerts

Verkada’s mission is to protect people, assets and privacy. A core part of delivering on that mission is to provide timely and useful alerts when our cameras detect potential incidents.  Therefore, we’re excited to announce our upgraded Motion and Crowd alerts. With this upgrade, customers get an alert almost instantly after motion is detected on their camera. This reduction in alert latency enables our customers to react in near real-time to events that occur on their premises, thereby reducing response times and enabling new use cases for our alerts.

For example, we have customers in the retail industry who use motion alerts to detect when a new customer has entered their store and needs attention. To provide prompt customer service, alerts need to arrive as soon as the customer is detected. Similarly, we have customers in the education industry who want to detect and disperse crowds quickly as part of their COVID-19 safety precautions, and need near real-time alerts to intervene before the crowds build up. With our upgraded alerts, these use cases are now possible.

In addition to lowering the alert latency, we have also enhanced our Motion and Crowd alert emails and SMS alerts. To simplify alert triage, the email and SMS alerts contain short animations (GIFs) that give an overview of the situation without requiring the user enter Command. They also contain a link to the underlying event for customers who want to investigate the situation further. These improvements reduce the time required to triage alerts and identify the relevant footage for an event, thereby reducing the time spent investigating false alerts, and giving our customers more time to investigate real incidents. 

Upgraded Motion and Crowd alerts are automatically enabled for all customers, so you will immediately start seeing lower alert latencies and new email and SMS alerts.