I work in 911 dispatch, I’m sure there’s a lot of bias involved here like the number of people who own apple watches vs pixel watches

But as far as I can tell I haven’t gotten any accidental calls from a pixel watch. I have gotten countless from iphones and apple watches though.

I haven’t really looked into how they work, how to trigger them, what settings you need to turn on and off, etc.

The apple devices I know play a pre-recorded message for their fall and car crash detection. I assume but don’t know that pixels do the same sort of thing for these SOS activations.

Also somewhat recently apple finally added “a press 0 to end this message” feature and I can’t be more grateful for that. It used to be the message kept looping until the caller turned it off, and since a lot of these calls came from old people who barely know what a cell phone is, people who were shaken up because they were in a car crash and not thinking straight, or just plain confused idiots who are trying to figure out why their watch is talking to them, trying to get them to turn it off was a fucking battle.

The accuracy of these activations, in my experience, is pretty hit or miss. We get a decent amount of them, but I don’t find them to be a major issue overall. We get a call, listen for about 30 seconds, if we don’t hear anything unusual we hang up and try to call them back. Send cops out to check the area, if they pick up and say there’s no emergency then all’s well and good. If they don’t, cops go drive by and either see an emergency or don’t.

Even before smart watches and crash detection were a thing, we were getting plenty of butt dials, I haven’t noticed a significant uptick in that since they started rolling out, so not really anything I have a strong opinion about one way or the other.