[freshhawk]

I have this same thing as an app on my phone (that I wrote myself and is not polished but who cares, it works).

I think the idea is awesome, and it does work well to hear yourself when in that just-5-more-minutes-mom half awake state of mind.

Why a service rather than an alarm app? That strikes me as pushing the user into a less effective/usable solution to the problem that gives other parties access to personal information in order to ... I'm not even sure why, but I can't think of any reason the customer would prefer this.

[ether]

How does your app do text-to-speech, if you don't mind me asking?

The reason for building this as a service is because I thought there's more to this than just a single player alarm system if enough people want to use this. I just wanted to test it out and see enough people will like this. Hope this makes sense? :)

[freshhawk]

The phone app only replays a recorded message from yourself. I have one that runs on a laptop that does text to speech (it plays my music getting gradually louder with the time spoken every minute along with any other messages you want read out (either every minute or at specific times)).

I didn't have much experience with text to speech before this so I just used the open source stuff I knew about (espeak and the mbrola voices). I want to find a good way to do this in the app because I like the functionality so much that I use the laptop app more than the phone app. I'm talking about android so there are a few options I'll look at when I get back to this project.

I can see doing it as a service if you plan to add all sorts of magic on the back end (text to speech, read news/headlines/weather to you). All stuff you could do in an app but when you have that many features you can charge a monthly fee instead of a one time app sale and you can probably monetize the user data as well somehow. So yes, it does make sense.

For some reason this kind of thing trips my privacy alarm, I would be uncomfortable sharing the messages with a third party (even if the most personal message would be something like "get your lazy ass up on time today, you haven't gone for a run in three days"). On reflection this is probably just me and wouldn't apply to most people, I have a strong bias against storing private data or messages in the cloud because I work in those industries and am aware of how common it is to trawl the user data for funny stuff to share with coworkers.

[ether]

Yeah I agree that privacy is a valid issue. I will think about it some more. Thank you for the feedback!

[freshhawk]

No problem, it's cool to find someone else who thinks this type of alarm is something worth doing.

I'll be following your progress.

[TheKidCoder]

More than likely using the Twilio Text-To-Speech API: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/say

[caseysoftware]

One version of the app that works for iOS, Android, or dumb phones. Nothing to distribute so easy to deploy update. No need to go through Apple's approval process.

And since it's not on your phone, there's no way to get at or share your other info like Path did.