Personal Safety is an application developed for Pixel phones that intends to keep users safe and connected to responders and emergency contacts that they select.
The Personal Safety app comes preinstalled with Pixel devices and has features such as car crash detection, location sharing during an emergency and nearby crisis alerts.
The latest update from the app developers in a new feature called “emergency SOS” lets Pixel users tap the power button 5 times to quickly call emergency services, share the same info with emergency contacts and automatically record a video.
Version 2021.08.27 of the Personal Safety app was rolled out on the Play Store on 29th September according to XDA developers, adding the new “emergency SOS” feature. The feature, found in the app’s settings page, lets users choose what happens when they tap the power button 5 times in quick succession.
Users can configure the emergency SOS to call the emergency services number in their area, share real-time status updates on their location, remaining battery life, phone calls and to also start a video recording that will be automatically backed up in the cloud.
While setting up the service, you get to choose whether or not an alarm sound should be played during the countdown before the emergency SOS is triggered, since some users might prefer the SOS to be sent discreetly.
The Safety App points out that the video recordings can go up to 45 minutes in length and the average video size should be about 10 MB per minute of recording due to some compression.
A short 44-second video that XDA developers recorded as a test ended up being 13.5MB in size with a resolution of 720p and a bitrate of 2.5Mbps.
Videos once recorded are backed up to a user’s Google Account, therefore the phone needs to have an internet connection for the video to be uploaded. Once uploaded, the Personal Safety app can either automatically share the video recording with their emergency contacts or do nothing, depending on what the user chose during setup.
While sending the SOS, users will have about 5 seconds to cancel or let the SOS be sent. Users will still be able to operate their phone normally when an emergency SOS is ongoing; the video recording viewfinder is minimized to a picture and picture window when the user returns to the home screen, and a persistent notification is shown in the notifications’ panel to remind the user that a video is still being recorded.
Video recordings will only be stopped once the 45 minutes limit is reached or the user taps “Stop” while the phone is unlocked. Once the video is done recording, the user will have about 15 seconds to decide whether or not they want the recording to be shared with emergency contacts automatically.
Videos are stored on the cloud for 7 days, after which they’re automatically deleted. Before it’s deleted, the user can share a link to the file, which is hosted on Google’s servers. The user can, at any time, stop sharing the video or delete the video recording entirely.
