Start Your Day the Awkward Way: Alarm App Sends Wake-Up Calls From Strangers

For those of us not lucky enough to be morning people, waking up can be one the hardest parts of the day.

But a new alarm clock app is designed to make that process easier, or at least more interesting. Wakie matches up users around the world to wake each other up with anonymous phone calls from the app's community of users.

Users are divided into two groups: Wakies and Sleepyheads (yes, really), with the Wakies making calls to the Sleepyheads. Sign in with your phone number (you'll have to verify it via SMS) and choose whether you want to be woken up or be the one making a wake-up call.

Should you choose to be the one doing the waking, the app sends you a push notification when there is someone who needs to be woken up. All users are kept anonymous — the only identifying information you see is the country where the other user is based — and calls cut off at exactly one minute.

We took Wakie for a spin to see for ourselves how well the app works — we tried being both a Wakie and a Sleepyhead — and it was, well, awkward. The connection was grainy and not very clear and the users on the other side of the call didn't have much to say other than "hello" and "are you awake," though the man who woke us up did share that he was in the UK.

The app does have a built-in backup system in case you set an alarm and there's no one available to call you when the time comes. In these instances, it will call you with an automated wake-up message, definitely not as entertaining but enough to keep you from oversleeping.

Wakie is free and available to Android and Windows Phone users in the U.S., UK, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong (users in other countries can sign up as wakies but won't be able to set their own alarms). An iOS version is "coming soon."

Posted by : Gizmeon