By Jessica Brown, 18 October, 2013
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Hi. Apps like chimeclock or talking clock or voice time are apps that run in the background and tell you what time it is. However, they do not announce the date. Is there an app like these time telling apps that would announce the date instead of the time? Month, day and year? I know I can check for the date on the calendar, but I want to be able to hear the date without having to look for or open any apps, just like how I can with the time. Thank you.
Comments
Date on lock screen
When I touch the Calendar
yeah, the calendar icon speaks the date
If you really want something
I know
firing off the date at a specified time:
A "speaking" app
I, too, am looking for an app that ANNOUNCES the day (mainly) and maybe the time. I have an elderly mentally handicapped brother who does not read or write or tell time. He is beginning to 'forget' and often calls me during the day to ask me what day it is. He used to be able to function well with his daily routine, but now since he can't remember the day, he doesn't know what to do next or where he is supposed to be. I have set a daily alarm to ring at noon so he knows it's lunch time, I have an app that tells him the weather so he sort of knows what clothing to wear, but I haven't solved this "WHAT DAY IS IT?" So I'll re-ask the question: Is there an app that would announce the day?
Hi,
Hi,
Not that I know of. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's an app for telling the date. The easiest thing for you is to go to the callender icon and it'll tell you the date there. As I said, I don't think there's an app for this. I could be wrong, but...
Some ideas to explore
Like others, I'm not aware of any app whose purpose is to announce the day or date, however, you might consider some of these ideas.
I moved the calendar app to row 1, column 1 of page 1 of my home screen. The result is that the date is spoken whenever I unlock my phone. (Of course, Voiceover needs to be turned on for this to happen.)
As someone else mentioned, you might be able to set an alarm or reminder to speak the date. If that doesn't work or meet your needs, I bet you could create a shortcut that would speak the date, but I don't know what actions would need to be taken to run the shortcut.
If you have "Hey Siri" enabled, you can just ask Siri for the date. It's completely hands free. Just say, "Hey Siri, what's the date?"
SIRI Shortcut to Speak the Date
I also don't know the steps to create the shortcut, but I think that a SIRI shortcut should be able to solve this one for you. I think you should be able to create the shortcut so that the date is spoken at a specified time. You could create it to repeat at several specified times of day, if needed, as well. Perhaps someone who uses the Shortcuts app regularly may have the steps for you.
Shortcuts won‘t help. IFTTT may
Hello!
No, as of this time and as far as I know, Apple Shortcuts can‘t be set to automatically fire at specific times. They run when they‘re requested via Siri Command, via widget in the info center or directly in the shortcuts app.
A service that MIGHT be of use is IFTTT.
It allows you to specify so called triggers and actions to be taken if the trigger occurs.
And one of the available triggers is „date and time“.
So you can create an IFTTT applet which runs every day at a time you specify. For the action, you set it to send a notification. When all goes well, IFTTT will send a push notification to the connected phone every day informing you of the current date.
The method does have disadvantages: It only will work reliably if the phone is connected to the internet at the specified time. And it generally seems to be rather a lot of steps to take „only“ to get a notification of the current date.
But anyway. If you want to try it, start with the IFTTT app right here: https://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/ifttt/id660944635?mt=8
Alexa?
We are working with our special needs son to learn the concept of time. We were looking for an alarm app that would announce the day of the week, but haven’t found any. The closest thing to achieving this is Amazon Alexa. The only issue I foresee is that it doesn’t have repeat occurrence capability, so we would have to remember to set it every night.
Setting Alexa alarms
You can set up alarms on Alexa to fire every day, every week, just once, etc. You can do this from inside the Alexa app. When you set up the alarm you can also trigger an action to be taken. For example, I set up a daily alarm and added the command to play a radio station. Thus, when the alarm goes off every day, rather than hering the alarm sound, I hear the radio station which I selected.
--Pete