Microsoft’s ‘Mimicker Alarm’ Garage Project helps you start your day with mini games

Microsoft is back with another Garage Project (cute and novel apps made for iOS and Android phones), and this time it’s an alarm clock called Mimicker Alarm. At first glance, the style of this app looks eerily similar to that of the stock Android Clock app, but a deeper dive shows us that there’s a little more to it. Microsoft wants you to actually wake up when your alarm goes off, and to help you do that the company makes you play mini games powered by its Project Oxford machine learning APIs…

The alarm clock part of the app works exactly as you would expect. Just like every other alarm clock in the history of alarm clocks, you set a time that you want to wake up and the phone will give you two options: snooze and end. The snooze option seems a bit counterintuitive to me considering the point of this app is to wake up when you’re supposed to and stay awake, but I guess having snooze on an alarm clock is a non-negotiable.

If you choose to end the alarm, Mimicker Alarm makes sure you’re actually awake. 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. Another one called “Tongue Twister” makes you repeat a phrase, and the last one, “Color Capture,” might actually make you get out of bed. To finish Color Capture, you have to find an object that matches the suggested color.

Allison Light, who develops apps for Project Oxford, had this to say:

You start with dismiss or snooze. If you snooze, the default is five minutes to delay the game. If you dismiss, we mute the alarm – but then you have 30 seconds to complete this challenge. And if you don’t complete that game in time, we assume you’ve fallen back asleep and then the alarm will start ringing again. You only need to complete one game to shut off the alarm. You can choose the sounds and which games you want to play.

You can grab the app on the Play Store for free, and read more about it over at Microsoft’s Firehose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWJyCYkMc3Y