Wake difficult? Microsoft has made an alarm that forces you to wake up – Daily News – Lisbon

Tell A tongue twisters, take a selfie, go to the hunting right color. The Mimicker just off the alarm when complete the challenge

Microsoft has a new application for those who have trouble waking up with conventional alarms. The Mimicker Alarm begins by playing normally, but when trying to shut it down it forces the user to complete a challenge: can make a face, take a picture of an object in a color that application choice, or say one tongue twisters . But beneath the jokes, the Mimicker is a way for Microsoft to show that that their artificial intelligences are capable of.

When the alarm sounds and the user turns off the alarm, you have 30 seconds to complete a three challenges: take a selfie that mimics an emotion chosen randomly by the application, say tongue twisters offered to him, or take a picture of something other than the color on the screen. After 30 seconds, the application decides that the user must have fallen asleep and the alarm rings again.

The Mimicker, available for now only for Android, is a demonstration of the capabilities that are developed in Project Oxford, the its division dedicated to artificial intelligence. The phone has to distinguish a happy to a sad face, understand perfectly the speech of the user to know if the tongue twisters was well said, and easily distinguish the colors in a photograph with different levels of light and image quality. “In Mimicker show several of software developed for Project Oxford,” wrote Allison Light, one of the project coordinators, the application of the release announcement.

“Like any code we use is open, we felt that an alarm application would be easy for other developers read the code and understand how we used the software , “said Light, who said that the most part challenging project was to adjust the difficulty of the challenges. “How can we make the games difficult enough to help wake up but not too difficult to be feasible?” To overcome this obstacle, the team that developed the application started using the alarm every day, to go adjusting the difficulty to reality.

The Project Oxford was also behind other Microsoft projects, such as site be able to guess the age of a person from a photograph, the How-Old.net.