Timer / stopwatch / alarm skills

[echo-bravo-yahoo]

Does almond have any 1st/3rd party time-aware skills? The web interface doesn't recognize any of my attempts to trigger these behaviors.

[gcampax]

Almond has basic support for timer as a primitive available in every skill: any command can be repeated at a given time every day, or at a fixed interval. The wording is something like "every day at 7pm turn on the lights". If these commands do not work, it is a bug.

Simple reminders should also work, but we're working to make them more robust and more useful, especially one-off reminders.

[echo-bravo-yahoo]

I'm not currently at a computer w/almond-server installed, so I'm trying various things via Almond's try it out interface. Some use-cases work fairly well (maybe the first 50% or so?). Here are some example (good and bad) interactions. Since I haven't configured an account, I can't actually tell if these are working as intended or throwing some of the input out on parsing, but:

# BAD: short relative time (e.g., for timers) isn't recognized
> in 5 minutes, log a message "hello world"
Sorry, I did not understand that. Can you rephrase it?

> 5 minutes from now, log a message "hello world"
Sorry, I did not understand that. Can you rephrase it?

# GOOD: absolute time (e.g., for timers or alarms or notifications) is recognized
> at 10:23, log a message "hello world"
To receive notifications you must first create a personal Almond account.

# GOOD: long relative time (e.g., for timers) is recognized
> in an hour, log a message "hello world"
To receive notifications you must first create a personal Almond account.

> in 90 minutes, log a message "hello world"
To receive notifications you must first create a personal Almond account.

# BAD: I can't find any way to start a stopwatch / duration
> start a stopwatch
Sorry, I did not understand that. Can you rephrase it?

# BAD: some attempts to start a stopwatch erroneously report the current time
> start counting time
Right now, it's 10:22 AM.

[gcampax]

Thanks for trying things. I would suggest trying from inside the logged in interface of Web Almond because that will show you if the agent actually runs the right timer or not.

Anyway, tagging @emilyjchang who is working on timers at the moment.

[tonyespinoza1]

the relative timer seems to be working now (go emily!)

i am filing as enhancement, P3 for the timer/stop watch functionality we should build down the road.