Microsoft Invents World’s Trickiest Alarm Clock App to Switch Off

Since many people just can’t jump out of the bed the exact moment the alarm clock goes off, Microsoft invents world’s trickiest alarm clock app to switch off. Yes, that’s right – there will be no simple snooze button for you to reach and buy those extra minutes of precious sleep.

The new app virtually forces you to wake up and complete a task to silence the alarm. Mimicker Alarm has three tasks in store for you to perform to make it stop. One task is to take a selfie, no matter how dreadful that task may be at 6:00 in the morning.

Another task, which is called ‘Color Capture,’ asks you to get up and take a photo of an object in your room that matches a required color. And a third task is to repeat a tongue-twister phrase until you get it right.

Allison Light, the leader of Project Oxford, that is the team that developed the alarm clock from hell, said that the new app is more user-friendly than other options available on the market. She explained that the alarm app does have a snooze and a dismiss button.

If you press snooze, the challenge will be postponed for five minutes; if you choose to dismiss, the alarm will be muted but you’ll only have half a minute to complete the task.

If you fail, the alarm clock app will continue to ring because it assumes that you’ve just fallen asleep. Luckily, only one of the three tasks is enough to shut the alarm off. Plus, you can choose which task to complete the moment the alarm goes off. There are customizable sounds for your alarm app, too.

Furthermore, since the app is open source, it can be improved by amateur developers with new artificial intelligence traits. Microsoft said in a recent press release that the new app is an example of how the tech giant plans to ‘democratize’ AI. It explained that its long-term vision is to develop new apps that can see, hear, sense human users and even understand the underpinnings of human interaction.

Light and her team are already thinking about other apps that employ artificial intelligence to self-improve. They have already experimented with web-sites, so the challenge is not that daring.

Still, Light acknowledged that a tongue twister game at 6:00 a.m. is ‘challenging in its own way.’ She said that these games are already hard from a speech perspective so getting them right just after sleep may seem impossible to many.

Image Source: Pixabay