The study cited below shows that young children wake/respond significantly faster and more reliably to smoke alarms that employ their mother's voice as opposed to just a loud tone. The difference is far from negligible. As stated in the article, the median response time for the maternal voice was a mere two seconds, versus more than more than two and a half MINUTES (156 seconds) for the tone alarm. Since the Nest Protect already has the ability to play high quality audio including natural speech, it should possess all the necessary hardware to allow it to play a custom-recorded audio clip of the mother/caregiver's voice in order to wake a sleeping child and provide tailored instructions for evacuating the structure in the event of a fire. Said clip would logically be recorded and programmed into each individual Protect device through a feature enhancement in the app. As the father of three children between 2-10 years old, I have seen them sleep through some insanely noisy disturbances, and I believe that anything like this that could improve the likelihood of them quickly and successfully getting out of the house in the event of a nighttime emergency is a no brainer.
Maternal voice smoke alarms outperform tone alarms in waking grammar-school-age children
