Deterrence Messages
Many active-deterrence cameras (Dahua "-PV" models and similar) have a built-in speaker and a red/blue warning light. CleverCam can drive both: an operator handling an alarm can talk down an intruder — play a spoken warning over the camera, sound its siren, and flash the strobe — straight from the event they're working.
This page is where you pre-write the spoken messages your operators reach for most, so a warning is one click away instead of something typed under pressure.
Where to find it
Settings → Deterrence messages.
How it fits together
There are two halves:
- Capability detection (automatic). When a camera is added through the Camera Setup wizard, the hub probes it and records what it can do. You don't configure anything.
- Message library (this page). A per-VCR list of pre-written messages that operators pick from in the Snapshot wall.
Camera capabilities
On a site's Hardware tab, each camera that supports deterrence shows small badges next to its status:
- Talk — the camera has audio output, so custom audio and spoken messages can be played over it.
- Siren — the camera's built-in siren can be sounded.
- Strobe — the camera's warning light (red/blue on TIOC-style models) can be flashed.
A camera with none of these badges either isn't an active-deterrence model or hasn't been probed yet. Only capable cameras expose talk-down controls to operators — nothing to hide or disable manually.
The camera reports that it has a warning light, but not its colour — on active-deterrence models the strobe is red/blue; on plain white-light models it flashes white. The badge is labelled Strobe either way.
Flooding badge
The same row occasionally carries an amber ⚠ Flooding badge, which isn't a capability at all — it's a fault signal, and it can appear on any camera, deterrence-capable or not. It means the stream flooded the system with detections in the last 24 hours: enough of them, in one uninterrupted burst, to hit the detection cap. Usually that's a branch moving in frame, an insect on the lens, or a flickering light rather than anything a responder needs to see.
It sits between the camera's status and the Talk / Siren / Strobe badges, and hovering it shows exactly when the cap was hit. There's nothing to dismiss — the badge clears itself once 24 hours pass without another flood.
The same badge appears on the Performance & Reports → Sites → Cameras sub-tab, which is the place to see every flooding camera across the VCR at once; Runaway camera flag covers what actually sets it.
Message fields
Each message has:
- Label — the operator-facing name in the picker, e.g. Trespass warning or Armed response en route.
- Message — the exact words that are spoken, e.g. "You are on private property under 24-hour camera surveillance. Armed response has been dispatched. Leave the premises immediately."
- Voice — the voice used to speak the message. Defaults to a South African English voice.
- Sort order — controls the order in the operator's picker.
- Active — inactive messages are hidden from operators without being deleted.
You don't record anything. The first time a message is played over a camera it is voiced automatically (text-to-speech) and cached, so every later play is instant.
Typing a one-off message
Operators aren't limited to the library — in the Snapshot wall they can also type a message on the spot and have it spoken over the camera. The library is simply for the warnings you use often enough to want ready-made.
What's next
Letting an operator record their own voice and play it live over the camera is planned. For now, deterrence audio is either a saved message or typed text, both voiced automatically.