People and presence
How to add a household member, enrol their face on a screen, and understand what Mirra stores about them and where recognition actually happens.
Household members are metered per account. The plans Mirra ships with cover 2 people on Free, 6 on Home, 12 on Family, 30 on Pro and 200 on Enterprise; the commercial tiers cover 10, 50 and 500. Plan & usage shows the count for your own account.
What a person is
A person in Mirra is a face and a name. It is not a login. Somebody who signs in to the portal is a user, and the two lists are deliberately separate — a child on the wall recogniser has no account and needs none, and an owner who never stands in front of a screen never has to become a person.
Adding a person gives Mirra a name to greet, somewhere to hang their own greeting and their profile, and somebody for a message to be left for. Until you enrol a face, that is all it is: no screen can recognise anybody until it has been shown them.
Everything on this page lives at Household in the top bar, and everything on it is visible to every full-access member of the household. There is no private tier and Mirra does not pretend to offer one.
Adding someone
Open Household
It is in the top bar. With nobody added yet the page reads “No one added yet”.
Type a name
Name is required. It is what the card shows and what the confirmation dialogues use when you remove somebody.
Add a greeting name if the short form differs
Greeting name (optional) is what the mirror calls them, on the glass and out loud. Leave it blank and the full name is used for both.
Press Add person
The card appears in the list on the left, with the greeting fields, a button that opens their profile and the face enrolment section on it.
Adding a person changes nothing on any screen. Nothing is recognised until a face is enrolled, and enrolment is per screen.
If your plan's people limit is already reached, the form clears and no card appears — the refusal is not shown on the page. Check Household members on Plan & usage before assuming something broke.
Enrolling a face on a screen
Enrolment is the screen learning a face. It happens at the screen, in front of the person, and it has to be done once per screen: a face learned in the kitchen means nothing to the hall.
Pair the screen first
With no screens paired, the Face enrollment section reads “Pair a screen first”.
Check the screen is online
The Enrol face button is disabled for any screen Mirra cannot currently reach.
Press Enrol face beside that screen
The page confirms with “Go and stand in front of the screen — it's learning …'s face now.”
Stand in front of the screen
The screen shows “Learning …'s face” over a progress bar and talks you through it: “Look at the mirror”, then “Hold still”, then “Now turn your head slightly”. If it cannot see you it says “No face detected — come closer”. It takes six samples, no closer together than seven-tenths of a second; the note on the Add someone form puts the whole thing at about ten seconds in front of the screen.
Wait for Enrolled
The screen says “Thank you, … — I'll know you now” and clears itself after a few seconds. The Household page then shows a “6 samples” pill beside that screen, and the button becomes Re-enrol.
Enrolment opens the camera even when “Camera on this screen” is switched off — it needs the lens for as long as the enrolment lasts and then releases it. Enrolling does not switch recognition on. For the screen to recognise anybody afterwards, the camera setting has to be on.
What is stored, and where
Each sample becomes a face descriptor: 128 numbers describing the geometry of a face. Descriptors are the only biometric artefact Mirra ever produces, and they are written to the screen's own browser storage against the person's id. Camera frames are analysed and discarded in the same breath — no image is saved and none is uploaded.
What reaches Mirra's servers is the fact of an enrolment, never its content. The screen reports which person and how many samples; there is no route by which a descriptor could travel, because the screen never sends one.
- On the screen: one record per enrolled person — their id, their descriptors, and when they were saved.
- In Mirra: the person's name, greeting name, auto-greet setting, personal greetings, and the optional profile you fill in.
- In Mirra: for each screen the person is enrolled on, the sample count and the date of enrolment.
- In Mirra: a presence event each time a screen decides about somebody — which screen, which person or nobody, whether it greeted them, and when.
- Nowhere: photographs, video, or anything a face could be reconstructed from.
- The recognition models are part of the screen app rather than fetched from a third party, so no outside service is told that a face has been seen.
Presence events are what the “Who was home, and when” retention setting governs, on the Settings page. Thirty days by default; the choices run from seven days to keeping them until you close the account.
How recognition works, and what it will not do
With the camera on, a screen looks at a frame about once a second. If it finds a face it turns it into a descriptor and compares it against every sample it holds for everybody enrolled on that screen, keeping the closest. Near enough, and that is who it thinks you are. Not near enough, and you are somebody it does not know.
A face then has to stay in view for the linger time before anything is announced, and the room counts as empty only after a stretch with no face at all. That pairing is what stops a passer-by, or a single dropped frame, from flapping the screen between scenes.
- One face at a time. The screen takes the single strongest face detection in the frame and ignores the rest, so in a room with three people it will recognise one of them.
- Enrolment does not travel. Enrol on each screen you want to be recognised by.
- There is no sensitivity dial. The matching threshold is fixed. Closely related faces can be confused, and re-enrolling in the light the screen actually lives in helps more than anything else available to you.
- An unknown face is still presence. It will switch scenes and satisfy a widget's presence rule, but it is never greeted — by name or at all.
- No camera, no recognition. A screen with the camera off has no idea who is in front of it.
While the lens is open the screen shows a small indicator — “Camera on”, or “… recognised” once it has placed somebody. It cannot be switched off, so nobody has to take the setting's word for it.
Everything on the Household page
Name and greeting name are set when you add somebody, and the card then shows them as text — there is no rename control on this page. The greeting fields sit on the card itself; the profile is behind the button reading “What the assistant knows about …”, which opens it underneath. Text fields in both save when you click away from them rather than on every keystroke, and the dropdowns save the moment you change them.
Clearing every field in the profile panel deletes the profile rather than storing a row of blanks, and the assistant goes back to behaving exactly as it did before anybody filled anything in.
The Presence panel on a screen
Everything about the camera itself belongs to the screen, not to the person, because it describes a room. Open Screens, choose the screen, and find Presence in the right-hand column.
Presence also drives widget visibility: any widget can be set to show only when somebody is in front of the screen, or only when the room is empty. On a screen with no camera those rules are ignored and the widget always shows, rather than vanishing forever.
Removing someone, and forgetting a face
To clear one screen, press Forget
It appears beside any screen that person is enrolled on. Mirra asks “Delete …'s face data from this screen?”, then drops the enrolment record and tells the screen to refresh.
To remove the person entirely, press Remove
Mirra asks “Remove … from the household? Their face data is deleted too.” It then deletes the person, their profile, everything the assistant remembered about them and any message waiting for them.
Screens catch up on their own
Every screen refetches the household list when told to, and at least every five minutes anyway. Each one deletes the local face data of anybody no longer on that list.
Forget clears the record in Mirra, and the enrolment disappears from the page. What makes a screen delete its local copy is the person no longer appearing in the household list, which happens when you remove the person. If you need to be certain a particular screen holds nothing for somebody, remove them and add them again.
Removal is permanent and takes the profile, the assistant's memories about that person and their undelivered messages with it. Presence history survives, with the person's name detached from it — the sightings remain, attached to nobody.
How many people your plan covers
The limit is checked at the moment you press Add person, and nowhere else. That is deliberate: moving to a smaller plan never deletes anybody, it stops you adding the next one.
- Free — 2 household members
- Home — 6
- Family — 12
- Pro — 30
- Enterprise — 200
- Business Starter — 10, Business Pro — 50, Business Enterprise — 500
Plan & usage, in the account menu, shows Household members as a count against your limit. The figures above are what Mirra ships with; limits are stored per plan and can be changed, so your own page is the authority.
Related
- GreetingsHow Mirra greets people — the greeting widget on the glass, the spoken greeting when a screen recognises somebody, and the rules, quiet hours and cooldown that decide what is said and when.
- Screen settingsEvery setting on a screen's own page that belongs to the screen rather than to a scene — its shape, which way up it is, its camera and gestures, the commands you can send it, and unpairing.
- What Mirra remembers, and how to see or delete itMirra stores only the facts somebody asked it out loud to remember, shows every one of them in the words that produced them, and can be told to stop remembering altogether.
- Moments — messages left for peopleA moment is a short message left with the mirror for somebody in your household, passed on out loud the next time that person is recognised.
- Your dataSet how long Mirra keeps assistant transcripts, presence and the activity log, take a copy of everything held about your household, and close the account for good.
- Plans and allowancesWhat each Mirra plan includes — screens, household members and assistant credits — how credits are metered, and what happens when you reach a limit.