I have just a few questions regarding alarm.com 2 way voice. Is 2 way voice reliable and a necessity? What is ur opinion? I get the impression that most people don’t really care to have it. Does it result in a priority one dispatch? If operator cannot hear anything , would it still be considered priority one? I know it’s the main component to the Sonitrol system , and police agencies respect sonitrol for their reliability and apprehension rate, what is your opinion on 2 way voice?
P.S. I love my 2 way voice , it has prevented a false fire dispatch !!
Alarm.com 2-way voice is reliable. It’s not a necessity but it certainly adds value.
Whether or not it results in a higher priority dispatch depends completely on your police jurisdiction. All we can do is give them the information we have. It’s up to them to prioritize dispatching. If we don’t hear anything and therefore don’t report that we’ve heard something to the police dispatcher then I would imagine they would not prioritize it as a verified alarm, but again, that depends completely on your police jurisdiction.
My opinion is that 2-way voice is especially useful in 4 cases.
Verifying a break-in based on what we hear during an alarm.
When you don't have a land line telephone, you have visitors or kids who might trigger a false alarm and their cell phone is not on the the emergency contact list.
When you have monitored smoke detectors but no land line telephone. We dispatch on fire alarms before we will call cell phones on the contact list but we will call a land line or use 2-way voice before dispatching so it gives you more opportunity to cancel a false alarm.
Medical emergency dispatching. 2-way voice is great with a medical alert button and/or the Alarm.com Wellness (home health care) add-on.
It’s useful in other cases but these are the ones that come to mind off the top of my head.
More and more jurisdictions are adopting policies to not respond to unverified home security system alarms. IMO, 2way voice and cameras (or image sensors) are a necessity for home security systems as they provide means of remote verification of the alarm event