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Microsoft's new alarm app will wake you up for good

By Vijay Anand & Peter Chu - on 26 Jan 2016, 10:00am

Microsoft's new alarm app promises that you wake up for good

Image source: Microsoft

For most of us, waking up at any point in time before noon would be considered as torture. So imagine then, the agony that comes with waking up at the break of dawn, and being forced to imitate a series of facial expressions in order to shut off the blare of your alarm.

That’s what Microsoft’s Mimicker Alarm app will make you do.

Not into making funny faces? You can also have the app make you recite tongue twisters or get you to take a photo of an object that matches the color of the app’s choosing. Of course, you can opt to hit the snooze button and continue your slumber, but it’ll only spare you from the trouble for all but five minutes. By the way, if you fail to complete any of the app’s tasks within 30 seconds, it will assume that you’ve dozed off, which would result in the alarm going off again.

The good news is that the folks at Microsoft aren’t a sadistic bunch. You’re free to use the app purely as an alarm clock without having to put yourself through any of its games.

Microsoft designed the Mimicker Alarm app to demonstrate what its developers could do with their Project Oxford artificial intelligence services.

“With Mimicker, we are showcasing several different Project Oxford APIs. We wanted to build a simple app that used Project Oxford to make it unique and interesting. Since we’re open sourcing all of the code, we thought an alarm app would be easy for other developers to read the code and see how we used the APIs,” said Allison Light, a program manager on a team that develops apps for Project Oxford.

Microsoft’s Mimicker Alarm app is currently available as a free download on the Google Play Store.

 

Source: TechCrunch via Microsoft

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