Moshi Voice Control Alarm Clock Using IVR Found to Have One Major Problem

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The Gadgeteer’s Julie says she reviewed the Moshi Voice Control Alarm Clock last winter, “and have been using it ever since. I’ve come to rely on the ability to control my alarm clock with my voice. It’s no longer just a novelty for me.”

Occupational hazard of you bleeding-edge first adopters. She now reviews Moshi’s new model with a built in radio and two alarms, which she finds not quite so indispensable.

“I have had pretty good luck controlling the original Moshi voice control clock,” she says at the outset, noting “I’ve only had two problems with that clock. Once in a while it will not correctly recognize an alarm time. This is almost always when I say five thirty or another time with thirty.” No matter, she has “learned to replace 5:30 with 4:29 or 5:31.”

The other issue is a bit more serious: telling Moshi to turn off the alarm. “I think this is mainly due to the fact that I almost always have a radio playing in the same room because I have a radio wake me up first.”

Naturally she was expecting the Voice Control Digital Clock Radio “to have improved capability to recognize my voice commands. The clock uses IVR, which stands for Interactive Voice Response. That’s just a fancy way of saying that the clock is always listening for you to give it a command.” It recognizes eleven commands, Julie says, including “Time – tells you the current time. Set Time – allows you to set the current time. Alarm – tells you what the alarms are set to. Snooze – snoozes the current alarm,” and so on.

But there is a huge drawback, according to Julie -- “you can’t turn off a radio alarm with your voice. You have to press the snooze or on/off button to turn it off. Boo.” In other words, you have to actually, well, get up. Bummer, man.

So “when it comes down to it, I can’t recommend the Moshi Voice Control Digital Clock Radio. Although it works fine as a manually operated alarm clock, the voice control feature is sorely lacking,” Julie concludes, adding “that would be the main reason anyone would pay $70 for this product.”

(source: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/ivr/articles/100682-moshi-voice-control-alarm-clock-using-ivr-found.htm)