A great and affordable alarm clock Moshi speaks and listens

One of the things which need to be developed further is the alarm clocks. Besides finding a better way to wake us up, they also need to become more suitable for our personal needs. Sure, there are other talking clocks out there, but the Moshi Voice Control (VC) Alarm Clock is not just an average talking clock. The Moshi VC Alarm Clock is the first ‘listening clock’ that allows you to use several commands as setting the time or the alarm by your voice alone.

You can activate Moshi in two ways. Either by saying “Hello Moshi” or by tilting back the display by pressing it. Unfortunately, you can only activate it by voice when saying “Hello Moshi” only when the clock is powered through the AC wall plug. When it is powered by 4 AAA batteries, the only way you can access the voice commands is by pressing back on the display. That feature prolongs battery life by saving power needed to power clock’s sensors.

It can comprehend the following commands: Time, Set Time, Alarm, Set Alarm, Alarm Sound, Turn Off the Alarm, Sleep Sound, Play Sleep Sound, Today’s Date, Temperature, Night Light and Help. All the commands are written boldly on the back of the Moshi so you don’t have to commit them all to memory right away. It has 3 default alarm sounds which gradually become louder, 3 sleep sounds meant to help you fall asleep, night light (Single/Multi) which has to be turned on or off manually and is pretty useful since the usual glowing clocks can be pretty annoying when you can’t fall asleep.

Moshi’s combination of Neural Net and Hidden Markov Modeling (HMM) Phonetic Speaker Independent (SI) Recognition Software allows anyone to be able to control their electronics using their voice alone. The HMM recognition is a statistical model that requires zero training, zero setup, and is incredibly simple and easy to use. The combination of the HMM and Neural Net model is supported and trained to recognize over one thousand different recorded voices.

Moshi spent 3 years traveling to each region of the United States to record every single different voice type. This allows all of Moshi’s products to be able to understand a large vocabulary of voice recognition commands. The technology is speaker independent (and not dependent) making all Moshi’s products capable of understanding almost anyone right out of the box. Moshi’s technology even accommodates a wide variety of accents too.

However, in practical use it was inaccurate on several occasions. Most of the errors revolved around mishearing AM or PM and 5’s and 9’s. You can immediately re-say whatever was wrongly understood but you have to start the process all over again. The range of Moshi is quite good, so you can give your commands from the other side of a larger room. Although it operates its best in the quiet environment,

Setting the date, year, and temperature all needed to be done manually on the back of Moshi and was very unpredictable. There is no SNOOZE voice command, and you have to manually press back the display in order to activate snooze mode. Luckily, the folks from MOSHI Lifestyle are actually listening to their customers and already announcing new features as the ability to choose different voices the clock uses, choose the alarm clock skin, choose the music to be woken by or even the wireless adapters that turn on your lights in the morning,

The Moshi Voice Controlled Talking Alarm Clock is best suited for the persons with impaired vision and the elderly as they would be the ones that would benefit from its core features more than the everyday citizen. While this demographic would need some help setting up the clock initially, it could really make their lives easier. Although not perfect, it is still being developed and enhanced in order to make it suitable to everyone’s personal taste.