As an Assistant Professor, I'm teaching Symbian OS at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria. My company "Mopius" is developing mobile software with a special focus on Symbian OS.
Mobile Morning (Plus: New S60 Text-to-Speech App!)
mopius | 10 March, 2007 18:57
Yesterday, I had an especially hard time getting up in the morning. This made me think about available tools that can help – and how these can be integrated with mobile phones. After all, you hear from time to time that the alarm clock in a mobile phone is one of the “killer”-applications, so it’s justified to think about it in more detail.
After all, every single human on this planet has to get up each day. A quick calculation reveals that in an average lifespan of 80 years you have to stand up nearly 30,000 times. Nowadays there are cars that automatically help you close your door if you don’t do it properly, but there are surprisingly few products available that assist you in the morning.
The Progressive Alarm Clocks are very interesting: they monitor your sleep and wake you up in the right moment. Quite helpful. But the idea has already been around for quite some time and I still have not seen a single one of those ready for sale in a real shop. Integrating this technology into a mobile phone would certainly be a fascinating – however, judging from how long it currently takes until they’re readily available, it might still take some time till this is possible.
Let’s reduce the expectations and activate the alarm clock that can project the current time to the ceiling of your room. A lot better than looking at the small display of an alarm clock on your bedside table. It’s almost certainly just a matter of time till small projectors are integrated into mobile phones. It’ll be interesting to “misuse” the projector for greatly enhancing the built-in alarm clock.
Until then, there’s another alternative – which is (in my opinion) even better than projecting the time. If someone/something reads the time for you, you don’t even have to open your eyes. Yes, I know that clocks are available for this, but at least I don’t have one. Therefore, I decided to develop a very simple application that does just that: it speaks – and nothing more. No fancy UI, nothing. Just place the app. on a softkey of the standby screen, press the button and hear the current time.
The new application called “HourPower” is using the built-in Text-To-Speech engine of the S60 3rd Edition phones (thanks to SymbianExample for revealing how to work with this non-documented feature!). The Text-To-Speech engine is multilingual and automatically adapts to the pronunciation of various languages, depending on the current phone language. Therefore, “HourPower” makes use of the phone language setting as well (thanks to Forum Nokia Champion vin2ktalks’s article at NewLC). Currently, “HourPower” is able to talk in English, German and French (which is untested as of now; my phone doesn’t support this language). You might not get the best results if you have your phone in a different language, as the synthesizer seems to pronounce words in the local dialect of the current language – but you’re very welcome to submit extensions for your favorite languages to the open source application!
I’ve just put the application online for free at symbianresources.com, feel free to download it and to send your feedback!
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Re: Mobile Morning (Plus: New S60 Text-to-Speech App!)
mopius | 15/03/2007, 21:12
Thanks, glad that you like the article! It's also good to know that the application works fine on other mobile phones :) Even though I've found out in the meantime that the French speech doesn't sound that good in my opinion. But especially the English one and also - to some extent - the German speech is quite good!
Re: Mobile Morning (Plus: New S60 Text-to-Speech App!)
hartti | 13/03/2007, 21:42
Personally, I do not like the projection alarm clocks. I am already waking too many times each night and seeing the time displayed in front of my eyes would make it really hard to get back to sleep (it is hard enough already). I prefer having the clock somewhere I cannot see it constantly.HourPower is nice example application, thank you for that!
However, my wife would kill me, if I started using that during the night (even with low voice...)
Hartti
Re: Mobile Morning (Plus: New S60 Text-to-Speech App!)
mopius | 15/03/2007, 21:15
True, that can be a big disadvantage if you don't want to see the time every time you wake up in the middle of the night. The model that I have just projects for a few seconds after you hit it, so it's a bit easier...And that's true, it's a bit more difficult to use the application when you're not alone. Unless you're sleeping with headphones on, that is... :)
Re: Mobile Morning (Plus: New S60 Text-to-Speech App!)
oferco | 22/04/2007, 00:30
Cool article!
I think that if you like alarm clocks AND want to know the weather forecast, check out MobiMate's new version of WorldMate. It has a new service called Weathercaster that provides vocal notifications of the weather forecast. That way you're always informed, and without any hassle.
It can be downloaded from: http://www.mobimate.com/s60_business.shtml?filename=series_60.jpg
Enjoy,
Ofer
thinking
moshing | 08/07/2008, 00:36
i like your thinking
Who am I?
Thinking about what mobile phones can do except messaging and voice calls is one of my main interests. At the department of Mobile Computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria), I can work on those ideas every day by collaborating with students, researching and - well - thinking.
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Re: Mobile Morning (Plus: New S60 Text-to-Speech App!)
karenh | 11/03/2007, 16:55