Wake Smarter: Brings Full Control, Including Voice Control, to Your Alarms

Wake Smarter-1

Wake Smarter Review

Wake Smarter puts that fancy bedside alarm clock to shame. It has an amazing variety of choices on how you would like your alarm to behave. There are options for the usual alarm sounds, repeats, snooze-ability, and custom labels. But Wake Smarter goes WAY beyond that.

As an alarm clock it has a daytime display with gorgeous background photos or textures to choose from, and it has a much simpler nighttime display with a black background a red numerals that are easy on the eyes in the dark. The fun begins once you set an alarm. You have the ability to set the alarm to the minute and choose which days of the week it applies to. But then you get to add actions to that alarm. Actions such as having a custom message read to you, or the weather, or the news headlines, or your day’s calendar events, or your Facebook or Twitter news. Even the alarm audio allows you to choose from some unique sounds or a radio station or one of your iTunes playlists. And you can have more that one action on your alarm, so if you can’t choose you can focus on which action you want to have first. You can even control the length of the snooze feature and set it between 1-60 minutes.

There is a sleep timer too that is just as customizable. You can control the length, up to two hours, and set the audio mode to radio, playlist, or choose from about a dozen sleep sounds. The sleep timer needs to be set manually, but the audio will stop as scheduled and not interfere with any of the alarms that are set.

Another great feature of Wake Smarter is the voice control. On the main clock face screen, there is a microphone icon. When tapped, Wake Smarter understands a limited number of voice commands such as “time,” “date,” “weather,” or “Facebook.” Wake Smarter will then read out what you’ve asked for. The text-to-speech function does quite well with difficult words and it’s quite understandable. There is even some level of customization of volume, pitch, and speed for the voice to make it suit your ear.

With all these options and features, navigating has the potential to be a problem, but not so with Wake Smarter. The main clock screen has just three icons to interact with. And even the full-featured Settings screen has only four main icons to find what you’re looking for. They are clearly marked and easily understood as to what they control. You shouldn’t find yourself getting lost in complex menu structures here.

Wake Smarter is a fantastic alarm clock app. It comes with it’s own set of sounds and backgrounds. The features and options include something for everyone. But the voice control and text-to-speech feature sets this clock app apart and make it worth the $2.99 price tag.

[rating: 5/5]

What we like:

  • Handles both falling asleep and waking up functions
  • Completely customizable
  • Variety of audio sources including radio, playlists, and included sounds
  • Brings Siri-like functions to non-Siri-enabled devices with voice control and text-to-speech

What to know:

  • Have to keep the app open

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