

Ask HN: Review My Startup (Zazu) - speek

Hey y'all,<p>The end goal of Zazu is to build Jarvis from Iron Man. We have delusions of grandeur, but we will not rest until it's done. The current iteration of the product is an Android application that replaces the built-in alarm clock with an alarm clock that we believe to be more intelligent: it pulls whatever information you find important -- like your RSS feeds, your calendar, your email, your twitter stream -- and reads that information to you using a Text-To-Speech engine. We're working on a deal with Nuance to get a better sounding TTS engine working, but for now we're relying on the phone's internals.<p>Within the next week we'll be launching a microstore within the application, so our users will be able to enable certain features (like the calendar integration). We're also working with a few big brands to create a new form of interactive marketing/advertising, but that's not going to be public for a while. We promise that we're only going to be providing relevant information to our users... so y'all won't be blasted with Colon Blow advertisements 1000x a day.<p>We just launched the first version of the application, and I really appreciate y'all's advice so I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. Please be harsh.<p>Thanks,
Marc<p>http://getzazu.com<p>Edit: We're going to be leaving the morning space fairly soon, meaning we'll integrate with your calendar to let you know what you need to regarding where you are and where you need to be (both physically and metaphorically). We're trying to transform the moment of alert into a moment of informed decision making. We'll be looking at emails and other areas that involve alerting and decision making, too.
======
eitally
I was a huge fan of the idea but the execution is really awful. An alarm clock
that wakes you up with a horrendous siren (in the production version can you
at last change the tone?) and then reads RSS feeds in a really bad TTS voice
just makes me want to put a pillow over my head (or throw the phone at the
wall). Besides this, though, the biggest problem I had was that it is
completely unintelligent in deciding which headlines are important. I tried
setting it up to read HN to my, or NYT, and since it just reads through the
feed from top to bottom it gets frustrating very quickly. In order for this to
be useful you need to do a lot of backend work to figure out 1) what the user
cares about, and 2) reformulate text into short headlines. You also have the
issue of content providers making stupid decisions about what to include on
their sites. For example, if I chose CNN (god help me), I might want to know
what Israel is doing in the West Bank but I sure as heck don't care about the
latest celeb to enter rehab, and since this is the first thing I hear in the
morning I'd be really peeved. This same basic criticism can be applied to my
email inbox, too. If you start reading spam to me, or mailing list messages,
I'm not a happy camper.

Calendar integration is critical and should be free. You should also add some
"smart" alarm functionality so you can gradually wake your users over a course
of several minutes with increasing light and sound. People want to wake up
gently first, and only care about content secondarily.

If you add ads, you'll scare away users... unless maybe you partner with guys
like Groupon or Ticketmaster so you can present deals, coupons, and events.

Regarding your Edit, I'd be interested to hear why you think anyone is looking
to make important decisions at the "moment of alert", especially when that
moment is when they wake.

To conclude, maybe I'm just not your target audience. I like my morning
routine to be tranquil and calm, and I learned after trying Zazu that I prefer
to be the one to engage my brain rather to have it forcibly engaged by my
alarm clock.

~~~
speek
Thanks for the input. It's really good to hear.

On the production app, you can now change the tone of the alarm (it was a
later alpha-phase function).

I do agree that the TTS engine on the phone is horrific, we're working on a
deal with Nuance to use their TTS engine. Their engine sounds amazing.

We're also working on calculating what the novelty of a piece of information
is to a specific user. The User Experience of the application will be
something like "here is a list of information sources that I want to hear
from" then we'll let you know what we think you find the most important
(novel).

As for the reformulation of text into short headlines, are you more interested
in the general concept of the headline or a general summary of the article?

I'm going to try to convince some people that the calendar should be free,
because it's a major "I need to know this stuff, this is why I'll start to use
you" feature.

We'll try to never present Plain Old Ads, we're trying to engage users with
brands. We believe there could be a real connection between a user and their
material world. Radio-style shout-outs are just too irritating.

The "moment of alert," at the moment (pun not intended), is really more of a
future thing. We're envisioning that if your wife emails you, Zazu will chime
in and let you know that there is something you should check on; or if a
meeting gets canceled, Zazu will let you know that you now have time to head
home (there's traffic on your normal route, so you should take the backroads)
and catch a movie with your family. As cheesy as that sounds, we really
believe that people could find some utility in being up to date without having
to explicitly look for whatever information you need to know. The current
manifestation of that idea is a glorified alarm clock -- with the moment of
alert being when the alarm goes off. Yes, I do realize that we are creating a
moment of alert for our users, but what better time is there to plan your day
than at the beginning of it? --, but we're just testing out the waters.

This feedback is great, I really appreciate it. Thanks!

------
petervandijck
Marc, that's a really long explanation (iron man? microstore? a new form of
marketing?) for something that's basically a somewhat improved alarm clock?

Feedback: the homepage doesn't really explain what it is clearly. The wording
can be better ("wakes you up verbally"?). You should show screenshots of the
app, and try to communicate its value/why it's cool (with quotes from users
perhaps). I couldn't even find a screenshot in the blog.

~~~
speek
I didn't mention in the description of the post what the next general step for
the company is. We're going to be leaving the morning space fairly soon,
meaning we'll integrate with your calendar to let you know what you need to
regarding where you are and where you need to be (both physically and
metaphorically). We're trying to transform the moment of alert into a moment
of informed decision making. We'll be looking at emails and other areas that
involve alerting and decision making, too.

We're aware of the lack of information conveyed on the website. That's on the
backlog, but it's just recently been pushed closer to the top of the stack.

~~~
tlack
The idea itself, as it currently stands, is an amazingly strong one that is
relevant to almost everyone. Are you sure it's necessary to get so complicated
so fast? I worry that perhaps you'll lose potential customers and mindshare by
being too quick to "web2.0 it." For instance, I almost stopped reading this
post after the first couple sentences - the information was in the wrong
order. Tell us the simple version first, then tell us how it will grow.

I hope this doesn't sound rude - I don't mean it to be. I really like your
idea.

------
SandB0x
Hey, some quick thoughts on the home page.

\- There's a lot of odd looking empty space around the logo. In general the
homepage just looks like you've placed the elements in random locations. Maybe
move the Blog/Team/Press/Contact links to a horizontal list to fill the space
at the top and lose "The Perch" for starters.

\- The text on the rotating set of images is hard to read due to downsampling
and jpeg compression. You probably shouldn't have paragraphs of text displayed
in this way - I want to read it at my own pace. I don't want to rush because
the image is about to change.

\- The logo's colour at the top is far too similar to the background. The
green would work much better.

\- Have an informative page title. Currently it just says "Zazu". Others may
know about SEO implications, but imaging I'd looked at your site earlier and
couldn't remember the name - the first thing I would try is typing "Android"
or "Alarm" into my Chrome/Firefox bar.

Currently installing the app itself...

\- The first screen said something like "Use existing login or enter an email
address and password to create and account". Does that mean if I misspell my
email address I'll actually just create a new account? You should have a quick
"New account? Yea/nay" dialog.

\- As yet no email confirmation saying "Welcome to Zazu!"

\- I'm not sure about the AM/PM option on the "new alarm" screen. It's not
consistent with the default Android alarm screen, and incrementing the time
over the AM/PM boundary isn't optimal this way.

\- IMPORTANT: A bug. Create several alarms. Deleting one deletes them all.

That's all I have time for. Basically I like the idea. You need to tighten up
the execution. {olish up the interface and the website for the real thing, try
and integrate with Google Reader or similar (I don't want to set up my feeds
all over again), change the word "infostreams" to feeds or something.

Good luck!

------
joystickers
Really awesome app idea, here are my suggestions:

1) The green color scheme clashes with the red and orange banner.

2)The duck doesn't stand out because there's little contrast between it and
the banner. I suggest changing the banner colors to something that blends in
better with the rest of the site.

3) The barcode takes up a lot of the screen, but isn't valuable. With a short
name like Zuzu, people can easily search for it on their phones. The goal is
to excite them enough to search for it.

4) Get rid of the "Perch" menu bar. All those links can be horizontally listed
under the banner giving you more space to show off the product.

5) Make the box of scrolling pictures MUCH bigger, stretching across the
entire screen (horizontally). The words in the pics are too small to read.

6) Get rid of the "Wake up and win with Zazu" image and keep the tagline "Zuzu
wakes you up verbally..." on a single line.

I hope this helps. If any of this is unclear and you'd like me to make
annotations on a screenshot, let me know.

Goodluck!

------
ThomPete
You want this:

"Zazu wakes you up verbally to your calendar, weather, and news!"

To be above the fold. Right now it's going under it.

------
vaksel
to be honest that page feels way too similar to those spam pages thrown up by
domain squatters.

------
jacquesm
clicky: <http://getzazu.com>

Sorry, but you will need to get another name.

I liked the implicit pun in this bit "but we will not rest until it's done"
for an alarm clock related start-up that's really funny. It basically says you
will _not_ be eating your own dogfood :)

Promoting 'zazu' as a brand when you do not have 'zazu.com' is working for
someone else without getting paid for it.

You yourself refer to it all over the site as 'zazu', not 'getzazu'.

~~~
zasz
Hey, Dropbox got away with only having getdropbox.com for a long time.

~~~
jacquesm
Zazu.com is apparently _not_ for sale.

see: <http://www.zazu.com/>

Maybe he's just playing hard to get but it could also simply be the truth.

The guy is called 'Glenn Zazulia'.

~~~
qq66
Almost everything is for sale - although they may not be able to agree on a
price.

------
SabrinaDent
_Zazu is an Android application that replaces the built-in alarm clock with an
alarm clock that we believe to be more intelligent: it pulls whatever
information you find important -- like your RSS feeds, your calendar, your
email, your twitter stream -- and reads that information to you using a Text-
To-Speech engine._

You say that really well. Your site doesn't. Is there some reason you can't
just say exactly that on your website?

------
yurisagalov
It seems to me like you're about to compete with a much more polished product,
Qwiki, that just won the TechCrunch disrupt event last week.

See <http://vimeo.com/15444551>, around 4:20.

