New Microsoft Alarm that Helps All the Late Sleepers

The latest and craziest thing we’ve heard of is the Microsoft Alarm that helps all the late sleepers get up in the morning by not just letting you go with a couple of snoozes. For anyone who has a hard time to wake up and more often ends up sleeping in than managing to get up after the entire hour of setting your phone on snooze, Microsoft came up with a solution. It seems fun and effective at first, but may not feel like that when you’re battling the grogginess of the first few hours of the day.

Also named ‘Mimicker Alarm’, this application is not exactly the first of its kin, having been developed under Microsoft’s in-house Garage program. The initiative that encourages its employees to develop applicable in day to day life applications or hardware in their spare time has seen plenty of other hilarious ideas on this topic before. Considering that everything is open source and available on GitHub, anyone can pitch in or bring upgrades to it.

The Mimicker Alarm uses smartphone features such as face recognition and in-built microphone to be effective. As soon as the alarm goes off, it will only turn off only once you’ve performed the thing it asks you to do. For example, making a certain facial expression. Considering that the alarm would not go off without you tapping on the icon that turns on the front camera and until the phone detects you smiling, that’s plenty of things to do to make sure even the drowsiest of people wake up.

Alternatively, there are other ‘challenges’ you may get attached to your morning alarm. For example, the app may ask you to take a picture of an object of a particular color, having you not only have to open your eyes, understand what you have to do but also look around for things that you could photograph. Lastly, another type of challenge is the one where you have to say a tongue twister; probably the most difficult to pull off but most likely also the most effective.

All of the challenges that the app sets you up to do have to be completed within 30 seconds or else Mimicker Alarm decides to restart. Yes, that’s right, no snoozing whatsoever is allowed. However, as soon as you manage to complete the game, you can share results and scores with friends and even has an inbuilt invite button if you want to spread the word.

The app is currently available in the Google Play store only, so Android users may want to go check it out. While there’s no guarantee that the Mimicker Alarm will turn out to be more effective for you – depending on how difficult it really is for you to get up in the morning – it may at least make you smile every time you get up. Literally.