Moshi Interactive Voice Recognition Travel Alarm Clock White

Comment: I gave this clock to my brother as a present. He likes it a lot. He's always late and I can hear his alarm clock ringing, so now he just tells the clock to shut off and he never has to get out of bed. I guess that's a bad thing cuz now he's still late. oh well!

Comment: I talked to it some on the first day and that is it. That day it got the time right, but refused to get the alarm time right despite several repetitions and a quiet background. Fortunately there are +, -, and set buttons on the bottom for manual entry. But they are SO convenient compared to the voice that if I want to change the alarm time I Always do so that way. Some of it's mistakes were bizzare too. It is supposed to default to AM if you don't specify, so why would it set the alarm for pm if I did not say anything about that? So why have the voice input?

Another thing is it only accepts voice input when the nightlight/snooze button is pressed or supposedly at the end of the alarm sounding. I have never gotten the latter to work over the sound of the repeating alarm. Among other thing this means you can't set the clock from across the room since you must first hit the button. Want to do 2 commands, hit it again. The snooze button will give you 9 more minutes of sleep, which is ok, but the alarm off button is right on the side where you might pick the whole unit up. My first week I found this very easy to do. Now it is on the other side of the room, where unless I hit snooze first it won't hear me. So why have voice input?

Frankly, I use the voice so infrequently, and would even if it worked well, that I need to reference the manual for which commands to use. This hurts it's travel feature. But let's say you have a good memory at 0'dark 30 in the morning, when you turn on the alarm or change the time on the alarm, it sounds, right then and there. This is to let you know that it is actualy set, and which alarm choice it is. What it does is makes you want to say "Shhh, don't wake anyone else." The nightlight also comes on when you use the buttons, so if anyone else is with you, you might as well turn on the room light and bang some pots.

It does have a help menu, where it will loudly tell you all of the command options. This gets to another anoyance. It has 2 volumes: loud and louder. I leave it on loud. It has a few alarm choices: tubular bells, wood chimes, and something else. Tubular bells is like the world is ending and all the church bells are ringing. I leave mine on wood chimes which is a little softer.

After a minute of alarm it will automaticaly snooze for 9 minutes, IIRC, and do that a total of 3 times, ending at 30 minutes after your set time. It only has the one alarm time so, if you wake up super tired there is no way you will be able to reset the thing for 2 hours later. To set the alarm manualy, you have to use the set button to cycle through the regular time first, hours then minutes, all the while it is loudly telling you the entries you can see.

If it had a dial for volume, it would at least come up to 2 stars. If it would respond to "Hello Moshi" like others by Moshi, that might give it 3 or 4 stars. If it had an optional power cord too, it would be at 4 stars for sure. Throw in a 2nd alarm time and 5*. But no, why does it speak, why does it listen?

One nice feature is a button lock button, which would be good for travelers while the unit is in the suitcase, but given all of the other negatives, unless maybe you really need louder, I'd buy a cheaper battery unit.

Comment: I purchased this item with not the highest expectations. Basically I wanted to get my brother a cool travel alarm clock with some kind of new technology. I figured if there was any kind of voice activation feature, great, but really I just wanted to get him something cheap and interesting and this seemed to be a good fit.

First thing I noticed: it's a lot tinier than I expected! Fits in the palm of your hand.
Second: as long as you speak clearly, the voice activation works great and is very intuitive! I even heard him moan 'shut off' one morning when it went off and even though I thought he was barely legible, it worked.

He's extremely happy with the present, and I am too.

PS- the alarm sounds are, um, interesting (read: bizarre choices), but certainly effective. I like the bells.