Make iPhone Alarms Read Aloud Weather, Battery, Time & Other Info
When it comes to third-party alarm apps for smartphones, there are some that won’t let you snooze the alarm until you thoroughly shake your device, or perform some complex logical tasks, but you won’t find many ways of adding similar capabilities to the stock Clock app in iOS. Unless you have a jailbroken device, of course. Wake Info is a new Cydia tweak that takes a gentle, yet effective approach towards making sure you don’t keep snoozing your alarm, and start your day with the right kind of motivation. The tweak endows the stock alarm app with the ability to read aloud any information you want to hear in the morning. The information can be anything from the battery level of your phone to the unread email messages waiting in your inbox.
Since Wake Info isn’t a standalone app and makes all the changes to the stock Clock app, all its configuration options are located inside Settings. Before anything else, you have to enable the tweak using the first toggle provided in its options list. If you don’t have a problem with icon badges, turn the ‘Show Active Alarms’ option on, and a badge showing the number of pending alarm gets added to the Clock app.
To configure the Wake Info speech routine, head to the two options listed under ‘Configure Messages’. It is possible to make the alarms say different things when you snooze or dismiss them. The developer has written detailed instructions in each menu but thankfully, things aren’t as difficult to set up as they might appear at first glance. Just write any text you want in the available lines, and embed the tweak’s supported variables wherever you want to insert some real-time information. Wake Info offers quite a few variables; you can insert time, date, temperature, battery percentage, calendar events for the day, number of missed calls and number of unread emails to the tweak’s dismiss and snooze routines.
Wake Info is so detailed that it even lets you select the alarm volume level and language separate from the rest of the OS. To make sure none of the information is missed, you can toggle on banners to go with the speech. These banners display everything the tweak speaks, but tapping them won’t take you to any app.
Quite amazingly, such a feature-rich tweak is available as a free download for all jailbroken devices running iOS 5 and iOS 6. The tweak can be installed from the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store.
Great app! If I could set up the home city would be even more better.
It actually works well and isn’t creepy to wake up to. Definitely worth a shot.