Microsoft has released an alarm app for Android devices that requires much more than a simple hit of the snooze button. Called Mimicker Alarm, the app only accepts that the user has woken up when they have completed one of the three games.
The “Express Yourself” game requires the user to take a selfie that captures a specific emotion selected by the app. The “Color Capture” game, on the other hand, requires the user to take a picture of an object that matches a color from the game. The third game, called “Tongue Twister, requires repeating a phrase.
“We tried to do games that are challenging in their own way,” says Allison Light, a program manager on a team that develops apps for Project Oxford . “Tongue twisters, from a speech perspective, are hard. Especially when you’re just waking up, your tongue isn’t really awake yet. The ‘Color Capture’ game is challenging if you don’t have something of that color next to your bed. You might have to get out of bed and go to the living room to find it, and at that point you’re not going back to bed.”
What happens when the user fails to complete the game? The app, which uses the Microsoft Project Oxford machine learning APIs, assumes they have fallen asleep and will repeat the alarm.
“We're a lot nicer than other alarms,” Light says. “You start with dismiss or snooze. If you snooze, the default is five minutes to delay the game. If you dismiss, we mute the alarm – but then you have 30 seconds to complete this challenge. And if you don’t complete that game in time, we assume you’ve fallen back asleep and then the alarm will start ringing again. You only need to complete one game to shut off the alarm. You can choose the sounds and which games you want to play.”
The app has a novel take on alarm apps and could be useful to a user who is looking to make a change in their morning habits.
“People want to change habits, wake up better for the new year,” Light says. “And they thought this app would be a good way to do this. They said this was much more enjoyable than having a buzzer go off every morning.”
