Occupant app guide

Household settings

The household profile, the doorstep unit's voice and triggers, delivery details, and the door sensor — everything under Settings, explained.

Household profile

The basics that identify your household and shape how Soter behaves:

  • Household label — the name shown across the app and in alerts ("Rose Cottage").
  • Occupant count — how many people live at home; helps Soter phrase things sensibly.
  • Household study phase — pilot households only: tags new interactions as baseline or trial for the research team.
  • Notes — anything the household wants installers and supporters to know.

Voice and greeting

  • Default Soter voice — pick the voice the doorstep unit speaks with. Choose the one that feels right for your household.
  • Custom doorstep greeting — replace the standard greeting with your own opening line.

Deliveries

These two settings power the delivery verification in your doorstep policy:

  • Place to leave packages — where couriers are directed ("beside the planter, under the porch").
  • Delivery recipient names — the names parcels arrive addressed to. If the courier says a name on this list, the delivery verifies; a delivery for a stranger's name won't.

Helping Soter hear correctly

Real doorsteps have accents, local place names, and multiple languages. These hints make recognition noticeably better:

  • Recognition region and Expected languages — tune speech recognition for your area and the languages visitors actually use.
  • Names Soter may speak — people and terms Soter is allowed to say out loud.
  • Transcription-only names — names Soter should recognise in speech but never say back (privacy for household members).
  • Local words or terms — suburb names, organisations, anything visitors say that a generic system would mishear.
  • Recognition notes — free-form notes for the support team about recognition quirks.

When Soter wakes up (triggers)

  • Trigger mode — what starts an interaction: Face detection (Soter notices a person approaching), Doorbell button (the visitor taps the button on the Soter screen), or Both.
  • Trigger schedule overrides — switch modes on a schedule. The classic: a doorbell-only window every day 21:00–07:00, so a possum or a late passer-by doesn't start a conversation at 2 am. Each window has days, start and end times, and a note explaining why.
  • Minimum face size and consecutive detections — advanced tuning for how close and how definite a face must be before Soter engages. Larger values mean fewer false triggers from the street. The defaults suit most doors; change with support's help.

Face detection also pauses itself automatically when the camera view is too dark to be reliable - it switches to doorbell button mode.

The doorstep screen

Doorstep video display sets what the visitor sees on the unit's screen alongside the conversation: no camera view, a small video, or full-screen video with translucent or transparent conversation cards.

Alerts housekeeping

Dismiss stale alerts after — Off, 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, or 24 hours. Old unanswered alerts clear themselves so the Door page always reflects now.

Door units and indoor units

The top of the Settings page shows the equipment linked to your household: the doorstep unit (or units) at the door, and any indoor units around the home. You can see at a glance whether each unit is online, its battery state, and when it last checked in.

The Door units and notifications section, showing the active household, the linked door units, and the start of the indoor units list
Linked door units and indoor units for the household. Demo household data.

Each indoor unit has its own settings — where it sits, which occupant it belongs to, how it announces alerts (for example speaking the alert title aloud), whether it listens for voice responses, and a visual alert flash for occupants who won't hear a chime:

Settings for a kitchen indoor unit: display label, linked occupant, alert mode set to speak title, voice response set to listen and ask to confirm, and a visual alert flash toggle
An indoor unit's settings: alert voice, voice responses, and visual alert flash. Demo household data.

The door sensor

Households with a door sensor fitted get an extra layer of awareness — Soter knows when the door actually opened:

The Household profile and operating mode section, showing the household label, occupant count, and study phase fields, with the per-person display text-size options above
The household profile fields, with the personal display settings above them. Demo household data.
  • Left-open seconds — how long the door may stand open before a safety alert is raised.
  • Level 1 / Level 2 recipients and escalation delay — who hears about sensor alerts, with the same two-level escalation as door alerts.
  • Sensor events are smart about context: the door opening after an expected, verified visitor is treated as the visit being handled, not as a problem — and quiet stand-down suppresses sensor alerts entirely (see Operating modes).
  • The sensor's technical fields (sensor ID, MAC address, keys) are filled in at installation — you shouldn't need to touch them.

Who can change all this

Seeing these pages requires Can view settings pages; saving changes to household-wide settings requires Full admin access — except the operating mode, which has its own permission.