Smarter Alarm - Wake up to info being read to you

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Lothaen

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Jun 4, 2010
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reading the label is a good idea - I have my alarms set up as early, late, weekend - set up for my shift patterns - it'd be useful for my alarm to tell me that I am on the early shift for the day :)

also love the idea of quote of the day and the 'what happened on this day' features :) keep up the great work - this is fast becoming one of my best apps!
 

bernabap

Senior Member
Jul 25, 2009
217
16
Edward,

amazing your work, keep going!

I completed the PT-BRA translation on crowdin and changed some others to get better!

Suggestion1:

I also liked the reading label idea and I was thinking if you could add a option to set different languages for each label. So I could set my first alarm to be spoken in portuguese with all my brasilians feeds/news and then other alarm to spoke in english my international feeds/news. That would be cool. :)

Suggestion2:

When Smarter Alarm is speaking my time in portuguese is reading '0' as 'o'. Like 18 : o2. I know that in english this is normal but in portugues is not. Also would be better if you could add "and" ("e" in portuguese) between hour and minutes and add "minutes" ("minutos" in portuguese) word after spoke the minutes. That way will sound much better for brasilians. :eek:

I just bought the full version! ;)
 

edawerd

Senior Member
Jun 25, 2010
86
28
Hey guys,

last plea for votes... Well it doesnt look like Smarter Alarm is gonna make it as the winner, but my other app (Car Locator) is also in the final rounds. Unfortunately, its behind by 9 votes.

Contest ends in 4 hours, and I need to pick up 10 votes quickly.

SO: If you have a DROID INCREDIBLE, GALAXY TAB, or LG VORTEX, please open up the VCAST app store and vote for "CAR LOCATOR".

Thanks and sorry for asking so many times!!
 

Phateless

Senior Member
Aug 22, 2010
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Oakland
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Hey guys,

last plea for votes... Well it doesnt look like Smarter Alarm is gonna make it as the winner, but my other app (Car Locator) is also in the final rounds. Unfortunately, its behind by 9 votes.

Contest ends in 4 hours, and I need to pick up 10 votes quickly.

SO: If you have a DROID INCREDIBLE, GALAXY TAB, or LG VORTEX, please open up the VCAST app store and vote for "CAR LOCATOR".

Thanks and sorry for asking so many times!!

Does car locator work for all devices or only Verizon? It seriously bugs me that Google Maps doesn't have a pin drop feature so I can mark where I parked.
 

edawerd

Senior Member
Jun 25, 2010
86
28
Does car locator work for all devices or only Verizon? It seriously bugs me that Google Maps doesn't have a pin drop feature so I can mark where I parked.

It works for all devices, not just Verizon.

However, voting for this particular Verizon contest can only be done in the VCAST app store for Verizon phones. So if you have a phone with access to the vcast store, I'd strongly prefer if you get the app through there and rate it :)
 

Robrecht

Senior Member
Apr 5, 2005
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@edawerd: I have some kind of bug where an existing alarm starts playing everytime I open the app, even after I've dismissed it (and even after I've deleted it!). Other than that, all is working fine. Good luck on the contest, shame I can't vote.

@bernabap: I think your second issue is related to the text-to-speech software you're using. If I'm not mistaken, Smarter Alarm just sends a string to the TTS interpreter that contains the time in the format "18:02", and it's up to the interpreter to read it correctly. My Dutch SVOX voice, for example, reads it exactly like it should ("18 uur 2").

So the problem is in the way the Portuguese voice is programmed to read time. Maybe you could try a different TTS program?
 

edawerd

Senior Member
Jun 25, 2010
86
28
@edawerd: I have some kind of bug where an existing alarm starts playing everytime I open the app, even after I've dismissed it (and even after I've deleted it!). Other than that, all is working fine. Good luck on the contest, shame I can't vote.

interesting.... if possible, can you send me a set of steps so I can try to reproduce the bug on my phone
 

Lothaen

Senior Member
Jun 4, 2010
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edawerd, is the 'skipping bad news headlines' feature purely just skipping the headlines completely? i.e. if two of three headlines are less than three words will I just get one headline for that category?

I found that I was getting a lot less headlines in a morning than I expected and wondered if this was the cause... would it be possible to skip and read the next headline perhaps instead of skip all together? :)

Many thanks
 
Jan 13, 2011
4
0
Reinstalled Numerous times

I've tried reinstalling it numerous times on my Unrooted Captivate, but still no luck. The first time it worked 2 times then stopped working. The second and third time, the screen displays, but the wake-up sound and voice never come on.

When I press the, "Hear Alarm", it does work as advertised, but not when the scheduled alarm is suppose to wake.

Yes, it would be nice to have all the features mentioned in this thread, but at moment, I would just like for it to work.

Specs:

Samsung Captivate
Svox and Loquendo
Un-rooted
Froyo
Screen Lock
 
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Robrecht

Senior Member
Apr 5, 2005
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Silly question, perhaps, but is the alarm switched on? Is the indicator to the left of the entry for your alarm green (on) or grey?

Hope there'll be a new version soon, lots of cool things announced.
 

edawerd

Senior Member
Jun 25, 2010
86
28
Hey guys,

I'm going on vacation in Vietnam. Will be back in a week on the 21st of February. Just wanted to let everyone know because I probably won't have access to much internet there. Feel free to post any issues/feature requests and I'll take a look at them all when I get back.

Thanks everyone for your support!
 

sonof

Senior Member
Aug 16, 2010
308
50
Hey edawerd! Smarter Alarm is the coolest alarm-software I have ever used. I really like the idea that I wake up every morning while nice women voice tells me everything I need to hear. Finnish language support is also great, thanks sonof! But new gmail support needs to be translated.

I have also one bugreport. The RSS reader don't work. It just tells me in finnish, that "next your rss-feeds" and nothing more. I have tried two feeds: "feeds.feedburner.com/ampparit-uutiset" and "hs.fi/uutiset/rss/", and eather one aren't working. Can this be fixed?

Keep up nice work! I will vote Smarter Alarm to victory!
I translated the new Gmail feature. Wait for edawerd to update the strings.

Also, please let me know if you think something should be translated some other way. A couple of shortcuts had to be made due to the differences in English and Finnish word order. There's also this annoyance that minus degrees in weather report are told as plus degrees (i.e. -28 degrees is told as 28 degrees) because the TTS engine says nothing with - that is pulled from the weather service. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about it.

Edit: The RSS is working fine for me. Try this feed for example: http://yle.fi/uutiset/rss/paauutiset.rss
 
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Lothaen

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Jun 4, 2010
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I noticed that the people/contacts birthdays that you add in don't hit the calender - is it possible to get these read too?

Else I'll have to go put them in the google calender...
thanks
 

Robrecht

Senior Member
Apr 5, 2005
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Yeah, saw it too. Great! Congrats on winning that contest with Car Locator, by the way!

I haven't been able to check yet: does the new update include all the latest language files? I made some very small improvements to my Dutch translation a long time ago (shortly after the previous version was released).
 

edawerd

Senior Member
Jun 25, 2010
86
28
Yeah, saw it too. Great! Congrats on winning that contest with Car Locator, by the way!

I haven't been able to check yet: does the new update include all the latest language files? I made some very small improvements to my Dutch translation a long time ago (shortly after the previous version was released).

Yup I'm back! Car Locator took first place, and Smarter Alarm took a finalist spot, thanks to you. Thank you everyone for your support.

I included Italian in the latest update, but didnt update the Dutch translations (I forgot about that, sorry!). I'll put in the latest dutch translation files right now and have it ready for the next update.

Thanks!
 

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  • 14
    Hi everyone,

    This is Edward, developer of Car Locator. I just soft-launched my latest app and I wanted to tap this wonderful community to help me test it out and gather feedback before I start promoting it.

    The app is called "Smarter Alarm". Basically, instead of waking up to a blaring sound in the morning, Smarter Alarm will read customizable information to you, like the morning's weather, stock prices, headline news, sports scores, your friends' birthdays and more. It's similar to Iron Man's "Jarvis" alarm clock.

    I'll be adding more feeds in future updates, but I wanted to gauge interest before putting in the time =)

    I'd really appreciate any bug reports, feature requests, and improvements you might have! If you can find any verifiable bugs, I'll happily reward you with a free copy of the full version of any of my other apps: "Car Locator", "Copy Paste It" and "Screenshot It".

    Heres the market link: market://details?id=com.edwardkim.android.smarteralarm

    Thanks!

    p.s. The app is also entered in Verizon's VDC Power your app contest under the "information" category. Please vote for me! (poweryourappcontest.com/Protected/ApplicationListVote.aspx)
    1
    User configurable RSS feeds is a DREAM feature for me as well. And the enable Wi-Fi Data would be important as I have things such as JuiceDefender which switch them off when not in use. Specifically...turning Wi-FI ON would be the most important one since where you need an alarm, you will likely be at your house and you will likely have wi-fi there that you use everyday.


    So I suppose if I had to rate features it in order of important it would go like:
    1. Configurable alarm time for different days of the week.
    2. Turn Wi-Fi (or data) one minute prior to alarm going off. Make a trigger that checks if there is connectivity 1 min in advance and only enable the wifi if the trigger says there is no internet
    3. Music in the background. Configurable in volume and content, meaning you can select what tune to play while the voice is reading stuff.
    4. RSS feeds. YOU choose the feeds and news sites the alarm will read.
    5. Randomize the background music so that it's different on different days or it randomly picks a song to play in the background-that way it will sound like you're listening to the radio only it's playing YOUR favorite music and telling you only stuff YOU care about.

    Voices:
    SVOX Classic British
    SVOX Classic US Grace
    Loquendo Susan

    All 3 choices work pretty nice with the program. They are not like human voices but they are at least 5-10 times better than the default Android voice and WELL worth it. Hint: You can use them for navigation and reading your texts while you are driving as well.


    To OP: If you manage to implement most of those features, I think you can easily set a $5-7 price tag and this thing will STILL sell like hot bread on the market lol. . .

    Thanks for your feedback again, as well as the suggested voices

    I really like your ideas and I'll definitely be adding configurable multiple alarm times, music in the background, and rss feeds (1, 3, and 4). As for turning on wifi (2), I'll have to look into whether or not 3rd party apps are even allowed to turn on/off wifi without user input. I'm sure its possible, and if so, I'll add feature 2 as well.

    Look out for updates in the next week or 2!
    1
    Watch out dev, the app wakevoice is offering much of the same features as smarter alarm. I'm very supportive of this app however, I live how you respond to our feedback so quickly.

    Sent from my Samsung-SPH-D700 using XDA App
    1
    I LOVE THIS APP !!!!

    If i turn the pitch up to maximum and the speech rate to minimum. she sounds quite sexy lol. especially now its programmed to read out a dirty message to me in the mornings lol.. too explicit for this site. but the app is awesome. well done for making this..
    1
    Thanks.

    Saw this update and updated the free one for now. Noticed paid is version 2.1... are ads the only.difference?

    Love the.ability for multi alarms now. Keep up good work!