.. The talking alarm clock. Suddenly Mr. Ed pop into my head.  Anyway, Ivee, is a talking (or better voice actuate) alarm clock radio.  Although its not perfect, its pretty darn impressive.  On the plus side, it works using voice as you would expect.  You can speak ‘hello ivee’ and then provide a number of commands. It does a pretty good job of understanding you.  I like the idea that I can set, change and turn on the alarm without having to walk to the alarm clock.  However my favorite feature is the timer. I can through voice actuation set a timer.  Great when cooking! And funny enough I like that I can ask the time or temp without being near the clock.  I even like turning on the radio using voice.  Well mostly.  One time it did not understand me but understood my girlfriend, and her accent is pretty strong!  Also there are 6 ‘sleeping’ sounds you can play, like forest, ocean and soft tunes that you can play for a set time.  Pretty cool.

Now here are not the so great parts.

I used the voice command to set and turn on alarm one.  Worked great.  However, when I tried to turn off alarm 1, it keeped turning on and off alarm 2!  WTH?  Also I just moved into this place so it has a bit of an echo ( I moved from a really small apt so I do not have much) and that seem to through Ivee off a bit. Often I have to walk closer then I think I should have to do get Ivee to understand me. Another annoyance. You can use voice to turn the radio on, but once its one, Ivee will not take anymore commands.  Grrr.  Finally, Ivee seems to think I’m talking to it when I doing something else.  Not even talking?  I was cleaning the fireplace and some how the sounds of cleaning sounded like hello Ivee.  Really odd.

All and all its pretty cool.  It has some uses but I would like a few bugs worked out before I would have it as my main alarm clock.  There is a firmware update that might tweak a few things but I have not had time to install it yet. For this to really change how I think of using an alarm clock, I have to be able to do ALL functions from voice, and since turning on the radio stops all other commands, that is a big negative. And not being able to turn off Alarm 1 with my voice pretty much killed it.  Still, when I get time I will update the firmware and give it another go.  For now it will be a supplement clock for a few weeks.  Lets see just how much I end of using it.

You can get the clock now for $59.99.  Careful though, there are a few versions out there, so pay attention to what you are buying if you do not use the Ivee site.

Here is a list of the commands in case you were curious.

Hello ivee	Listens
Time	Tells you the time
Today’s Date	Tells you today’s date
Temperature	Tells you the indoor temperature
Alarms	Tells you the alarm status
Alarm 1/2	Tells you the alarm status
Set Alarm	Allows you to set alarm 1/2
Set Alarm 1/2	Allows you to set alarm 1/2
Alarm Sound	Allows you to choose 1 of 6 alarm sounds
Alarm 1/2 Sound	Allows you to choose 1 of 6 alarm sounds
Alarm 1/2 On	Turns on alarm 1/2
Turn Off the Alarms	Turns off alarm 1/2
Turn Off Alarm 1/2	Turns off alarm 1/2
Play Radio	Turns on the FM radio
Set Radio Preset	Allows you to set 1 of 6 FM presets
Play Sleep Sound	Will play your sleep sound of choice
Set Alarm	Allows you to set alarm 1/2
Set Sleep Sound	Allows you to choose 1 of 6 sleep sounds
Start Timer	Turns on the timer
Stop Timer	Turns off the timer
Set Timer	Allows you to set the timer
Set Timer Sound	Allows you to set the timer sound
Night Light	Turns the night light on/off
Settings	Allows you to change her system settings
Help	Offers a help menu
Cancel	Cancels