Microsoft has been pushing into iOS and Android a lot, and has also been experimenting with using artificial intelligence to do things like guess people's ages. Now, it has created an Android app designed to show off its AI skills.

The app is called Mimicker, and it's basically an alarm app for Android. While other alarms, however, simply wake you up by playing sounds, this app is a little different. Instead of simply waking up, you have to play a bit of a game to switch the app off.

For example, it might ask you to take a selfie with a happy face, or it might ask you to find something of a certain color, or even say a tongue-twister. After the user dismisses the alarm, they have to complete the game within 30 seconds. If they don't, the alarm will go off again, because it assumes you have gone back to sleep.

Users can choose the games they want to have to play, so you can choose to just make a face at the camera without having to run around the house trying to find something of a particular color.

While the alarm might sound annoying, it's really designed to show off Microsoft's machine-learning capabilities.

"We are showcasing several different Project Oxford APIs," said Allison Light, program manager at Microsoft's Project Oxford team, in a statement. "Since we're open-sourcing all of the code, we thought an alarm app would be easy for other developers to read the code and see how we used the APIs."

If you need a little extra push in the morning to actually get up, then head to the Google Play Store to download the app.

Via: The Verge