Launched this week
Fifi
An alarm that calls you, and reads you your day
51 followers
An alarm that calls you, and reads you your day
51 followers
Most alarms are a sound you silence. Fifi is a call you answer. It rings through Silent mode and a Focus — built on iOS 26 AlarmKit, so the alarm needs no network. Your Lock Screen shows an incoming call with a face and a name. Answer, and one of ten characters reads you your day: last night's note, your forecast, your headlines. An ASMR whisper, a film-noir detective, a nature doc, a drill sergeant, a pantomime baroness, a fairy godmother. 39 ringtones. A backup call. A streak.
@yancietroy I like that each character has its own personality. That should keep the calls from getting boring after a while.
@oliver_graf1 That was one of the main ideas behind Fifi. The characters aren’t just different voices as each one has their own personality and tone, so the morning briefing feels different depending on who you choose.
There’s a pretty wide range too, from calm/ASMR-style characters to more energetic personalities like a sergeant who basically tells you to get out of bed.
The goal is to make the experience feel more personal than hearing the same generic alarm sound every morning. :)
@yancietroy That sounds really fun. I’d definitely pick based on my mood that morning 😄
Refocus
The reframe from an alarm you silence to a call you answer is the part that stuck with me. I build voice AI at Callie Care, a companion that calls aging parents every day, and the biggest lever on whether someone picks up turned out to be the identity on the lock screen rather than the sound itself. A named face gets answered, an unknown number gets ignored. Question on the ten characters: do you see answer rates differ by persona, or does the choice mostly drive retention after the first week? On our side people pick a voice on day one and almost never switch, so that first pick carries a lot of weight. Also curious how you time the backup call.
@igorgurovich Yeah, that’s an interesting comparison. With Fifi, the “call” is really a gimmick layered on top of the normal iPhone alarm experience rather than an actual phone call.
Fifi still uses Apple’s AlarmKit, so it behaves like a normal alarm and shows the standard Apple alarm screen. After you dismiss/answer the alarm, the character greets you and delivers the morning briefing.
You can also choose a telephone-style alarm tone to make the whole “Fifi is calling you” concept feel more convincing, but there’s no actual incoming call or caller ID involved.
Because of that, I’m not really measuring “answer rates” by persona in the same way you are. I’m more interested in whether the character/voice someone chooses makes the wake-up experience more enjoyable and affects whether they keep using Fifi.
The point about people rarely switching voices after the first choice is interesting, though. I could see the initial character selection having a similar effect for Fifi, especially because the character is what you interact with immediately after waking up.