Waking up just got easier! Or...more annoying...

Do you struggle with getting up in the morning? Constantly finding yourself the night before saying, "I'm going to wake up early and get things done tomorrow!" Only, the next day you find yourself finally rousing from sleep approximately 16 snooze presses and realizing that, not only is breakfast no longer being served, but it is in fact 4pm? Happens to the best of us, but what if the process of waking up just wasn't so boring? Well...

Introducing Microsoft Mimicker!

In a nutshell, Mimicker is designed to make the waking up process more interactive. Set your alarm as usual, but once it goes off the fun begins! You have three choices: match the facial expression that Mimicker selects, find an object the colour of Mimicker's choosing, or say a tongue twister that Mimicker will display for you! Sounds easy enough right?

Mimicker does still have a snooze option for everyone out there who can't live without it, but if you dismiss the alarm you have 30 seconds to complete the game. If you don't complete the game in that amount of time, the app assumes that you have fallen back asleep and start going off again.

This and other recent releases (http://www.how-old.net/, https://www.projectoxford.ai/demo/Emotion#detection) are coming out of Microsofts 'Project Oxford', a powerful tool which gives users access to a large amount of API's and build off of the idea of Machine Learning, the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. For any aspiring developers out there, while in beta Project Oxford is totally free, so take advantage of it while you can!