This alarm won’t shut up til you play a game

Microsoft Garage is a community inside the company made up of self-described “hackers, makers, artists, tinkerers, musicians, inventors”.

Microsoft has released quite a few apps on non-Windows platforms lately, like Cortana and its Microsoft Selfie app. Mimicker Alarm for Android isn’t your regular alarm.

Playful and fun-loving aren’t the terms that I would typically associate with Microsoft, but the Mimicker Alarm app comes from Microsoft Garage – they produce projects in small teams distributed throughout Microsoft, like Google Labs does inside of Google – which is perhaps where they keep all the zanier folk. The games are also a way to show off several Microsoft Project Oxford machine learning APIs that focus on emotion, computer vision and speech. There are three mimicker games to choose from-the first of which makes you make faces ay your phone, “Express Yourself”, and you’ll see it featured in the below video. In “Color Capture”, you need to wipe away the gunk from your eyes well enough to play a color matching game.

Some of the tongue twisters include “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Another one called “Tongue Twister” makes you repeat a phrase, and the last one, “Color Capture”, might actually make you get out of bed.

Sounds perfectly diabolical to us. “You start with dismiss or snooze”.

Yesterday, I hit the snooze button FIVE TIMES before my cat finally jumped on my head to let me know it was time for his breakfast. After snoozing the clock, users must complete a short game within 30 seconds or face the alarm continually sounding until get the will to finish it.

The only way to turn off the alarm is by completing all the tasks within a time limit – if you don’t manage, the app will assume you’ve gone back to sleep and the alarm will go off again.