On Tue, 9 Oct 2018, Aaron C. de Bruyn wrote:
Sure--I totally agree. But we don't build smoke detectors into our
cell phones because that's not a very good use case. And I'm not
aware of weather alerts being broadcast to cell phones without having
an app installed, and it's unreliable. (Although some already have
AM/FM radios in them...)
Since 2011, WEA has been used for over 30,000 weather alerts including
tsunami, tornado, extreme wind, hurricane & typhoons. Unless you turn
alerts off on your cell phone. iPhone 5 (iOS 6 and later) includes WEA.
https://www.weather.gov/wrn/wea
Weather alerts are the largest catagory of Wireless Emergency Alerts on
cell phones. However, WEA is only used for the most severe weather
alerts. WEA is built into most smart cell phones, and overcomes the
congestion issues with text based Apps on cell phones.
And we come full circle. No single warning system works for everything.
That's why its important to have multiple warning systems or warning
communication channels.
Amazon Alexa is ahead of Google Assistant with weather warnings. Alexa
won't proactively warn you about tornados. But if you ask "Alexa, What's
the weather?" Alexa will tell you when there is a tornado warning in your
area at that moment. Google Assistant only tells you the forecast, not
information about active tornado warnings in your area.
Siri and Cortana are very far behind both Amazon and Google.
