SayWhen: Spoken Routines

SayWhen speaks what you set up, at the time you choose: a talking reminder, a countdown to leaving the house, a step-by-step checklist, the time or a morning briefing. Use it for voice reminders, as a talking clock with hourly time announcements, or for a kids' morning and bedtime routine. The voice is the speech engine installed on your phone.

WHAT YOU CAN SET UP
• Messages in your own words, such as "Shoes on, we leave in ten minutes".
• Countdowns: warnings before a time you pick, for example 10, 5 and now.
• Spoken checklists: a chime, then one step at a time. Tap "Done · next step" to hear the next one.
• The time and date, spoken on a schedule or whenever you tap "Say the time".
• A morning briefing: time, date, today's birthdays, and if you turn them on, today's calendar events and the next alarm on the phone.
• Birthdays you type in yourself, or from your contacts if you allow it.
• Schedules: chosen weekdays, a single date, or every N minutes between two times.
• Starting points: leave for school, bedtime, hourly time check. Nothing is scheduled until you save it.

SOUND THAT RESPECTS THE ROOM
• Two levels per routine. Normal stays silent while the phone is muted or in Do Not Disturb. Must hear uses alarm audio.
• Other audio is asked to turn down while SayWhen speaks. Music is not paused and the phone's volume is not changed; each routine has its own volume slider.
• Optional chime before speaking, one to three readings, and a preview before you save.
• Stop from the app or from the notification while speaking.
• Quiet hours, pause for some hours or until a date, skip the next one, and groups you switch on and off together.

IT SHOWS WHAT HAPPENED
• Diagnostics lists the planned and actual time of recent announcements and explains each result: spoken, stopped, muted, missed, voice missing and more.
• An announcement that arrives more than five minutes late is recorded as missed instead of being spoken late.
• It also shows permissions and which languages your phone can speak offline. Battery settings are suggested only after a missed or late announcement.

FAMILY HUB
• A large clock, the next announcement and today's checklists. Two columns on tablets.

NINE LANGUAGES
English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Turkish, for the app and for speaking.

WHAT SAYWHEN CANNOT DO
• No smart speakers: sound comes from this phone or a speaker connected to it.
• No weather and no news: SayWhen has no internet access.
• Timing depends on the phone. Android can refuse exact alarms, and some phone makers stop background apps or delay alarms. Diagnostics shows when that happened.
• Voice quality and languages depend on the installed speech engine. Some engines use the internet for some voices; SayWhen only picks voices installed for offline use.
• Must hear follows your phone's Do Not Disturb setting for alarms.
• While announcements are planned, Android shows an alarm icon in the status bar.
• A force stop removes SayWhen's alarms until you open the app again.
• Not a medical device: do not rely on it alone where a missed reminder could cause harm.

PERMISSIONS
• Alarms & reminders: to speak at the minute you set.
• Notifications: the Stop button while speaking and checklist reminders.
• Contacts: only if you turn on contact birthdays.
• Calendar: only if you turn on today's calendar in the briefing.
• Foreground service, wake lock and run at startup: to finish speaking with the screen off and to set alarms again after a restart.
No internet permission. No Do Not Disturb access, no overlay, no storage permission, no battery exemption request.

PRIVACY
No account and no server of ours. No analytics, no crash reporting. Routines, birthdays and history stay on your phone and are left out of Android backups. You can save your own backup file. Privacy policy: https://basilja.github.io/touchoff-privacy/privacy/saywhen/

Questions or problems: [email protected]