Android early access

WakeWhisper

A gentle spoken alarm that talks you awake.

Instead of a buzzer, WakeWhisper tells you the current time and how long is left until you need to be up. The voice starts quiet and occasional, then grows louder and more frequent, so you surface gradually rather than being jolted out of sleep.

Get early access See how it wakes you

Android only
Free early access
Works offline
No accounts
No ads

Get early access and help test it.

WakeWhisper is in early access on Android. Google makes the route slightly more ceremonial than it needs to be: join the tester group, opt in, then install from Google Play.

Join the tester group (required by Google)

Required by Google, and it unlocks the next two steps.
Join tester group
Opt in to the test

Works once you've joined the group.
Opt in to beta
Install from Google Play

The listing appears a few minutes after you opt in.
Install from Play Store
Seeing a "not found" page? That is normal until you have joined the tester group and opted in to the test.

Please stay opted in and keep the app installed for at least a couple of weeks. Feedback on what wakes you well, what grates, and anything confusing, missing, or broken is genuinely useful.

A buzzer only knows one volume.

An alarm has about a second to decide how your morning starts. Most of them make the same choice: maximum, immediately, until you make it stop.

Loud is not the same as awake.

Being startled out of sleep gets your eyes open and very little else. The noise ends and the grogginess is still there waiting.

It tells you nothing.

A tone is not information. You still have to find the phone and focus on a screen to learn what time it is or how much time you have.

Snooze is a blunt instrument.

Nine more minutes of silence, then the same shock again. The alarm has no way to ease off or press harder.

Every morning is not the same morning.

A slow Sunday and a flight to catch need different treatment. One fixed noise cannot tell the difference.

It talks you awake.

WakeWhisper speaks instead of buzzing, and what it says is the useful part: where you are in the morning, and how much of it is left.

It says the time out loud.

You hear the current time spoken without opening your eyes, reaching for the phone, or focusing on a bright screen.

It counts down to your target.

As well as the time now, it tells you how long is left until you actually need to be up. You wake up already knowing where you stand.

It escalates gently, then firmly.

The voice starts quiet and occasional and builds to louder and more frequent, so waking is a gradual climb rather than a single shock.

Save the ones that work.

An alert style is a reusable recipe. Build the wake-up that suits you once, name it, and point any alarm at it.

A look at WakeWhisper.

Alert styles

Build the wake-up you actually need.

Alert styles are built from phases. Each phase sets how long it runs, how often the voice speaks, how loud it is, and what it says. Stack a few together and you decide the whole shape of the morning.

Fade yourself awake over twenty minutes with a murmur that slowly gains confidence, or go from a whisper to insistent in two when the train will not wait. Speech uses your device's own text-to-speech, so a style you build works with no signal, on a plane, or in a basement.

Set duration per phase
Set how often it speaks
Set how loud it gets
Set what it says
Reusable across alarms

An alarm has one job: go off.

WakeWhisper uses exact alarms so it fires through Doze, runs a foreground service to keep the voice going for as long as the alarm lasts, and re-arms every alarm after a reboot. The escalation keeps climbing whether or not the app is open.

Exact alarms
Fires through Doze
Foreground service
Re-arms after reboot
Android 8.0 and up

Android still controls the final delivery path, and some phones need a permission or battery setting changed before any alarm app is dependable. WakeWhisper explains what it needs rather than pretending an app can overrule the system.

No account. No ads. No cloud.

Your alarms, alert styles, and settings stay on your phone, and nothing is uploaded. Speech is generated on the device by Android's own text-to-speech, so WakeWhisper never needs a connection to talk to you and never sends your voice or your schedule anywhere.

The only thing that can leave the device is an anonymous crash report if something breaks, and you can switch those off in Settings.

For mornings that need a nudge, not a shock.

Anywhere the useful information is how much time is left, and where being startled awake makes the next hour worse rather than better.

Early starts
Shift work
Naps with a hard stop
Waking a light sleeper
Flights to catch
Slow Sunday mornings

Try an alarm that tells you where you are.

Get early access, point it at the mornings you usually dread, and tell me where the voice helps and where it grates.

Get early access Back to the three steps

Support the next small experiment.

WakeWhisper is built by one person and is free during early access. Donations help cover testing, hosting, and the less glamorous work required to keep a small app moving.