Williamson County 911 and Williamson County Emergency Management Agency is asking residents with Amazon smart speakers to activate a new service on their device so they can receive emergency messages from local agencies.
The free service is called Hyper-Reach, it will allow Williamson County 911/EMA to send emergency messages to Alexa-compatible smart speakers.
In addition to Alexa units, Hyper-Reach delivers voice messages to landline and mobile phones, text messages, email, social media, web-browser push notification, smartphone apps, Internet-based advertising, RSS feeds, and many other methods. Residents without an Alexa device can sign up to receive emergency alerts by texting “alerts” to 618-663-4676 and following prompts to register landlines, cell phones or email services.
Williamson County EMA previously used “Nixle” for emergency alerts, but is changing to this type of notification starting February 1.
A detailed explanation is available here.
