Help me outsmart my smart clock.

May 25, 2022 9:25 AM

I bought a smart clock because I thought it could solve a specific problem, and I can't get it to solve that problem. Can you help me solve it?

For my bedside, I had a fairly old internet radio that, last week, suddenly decided to stop working. I have two conditions for bedside time appliances:

- The device cannot be my phone. I do not want my phone in my bedroom. As annoying as it may make things like this, this is non-negotiable. I'll go back to a 1950's style loud annoying bell alarm before I'll have my phone by my bed.
- Must play internet radio as an alarm (not a "hey google" command once I wake up, but a wake-me-up-in-the-morning alarm)

I was assured, by both a Lenovo sales rep and a Best Buy rep, that the Lenovo Smart Clock 2 could do that. So I get one, get it home, and start to set it up, and...nope. The SC2 has an alarm, but it only has like six preset sounds that the alarm can be, and "internet radio station of your choice" isn't one of them.

So then I pulled out my trusty Pixel phone and figured I could set up a routine that would trigger and make the SC2 play internet radio at a set time, using a Good Morning routine or something similar. But I can't make that work either, because I can't get the starter of that routine to be "SC2 alarm goes off".

I see a routine starter that might work, in the option "this routine will start when an alarm is dismissed (like on a smart speaker or display)", but then when I try to use that option, the SC2 does not appear in the list of "Assistant-ready speakers/displays" that I can select a device from.

Is there any way, natively that I may have missed or via either Google Assistant or IFTTT or the like, that I can get my Smart Clock to sound a morning alarm that is an internet radio station? Or is there another non-phone device I should be looking into for this functionality?

posted by pdb to Technology (9 answers total)

Best answer: Have you tried just putting in a command like you'd actually say into a Routine in Google Home? I have a bunch of these - not literally the Smart Clock 2, but a couple of the smaller 1s and the Essentials one with the seven-segment clock display - and 90% of the actual commands I have in the routines I use are things I free-form typed in. (Like, literally, one is "set office lights to 90%", one is "turn off specific named device", one is "set lights to candlelight" since it doesn't give you a pre-set action to change the colors on smart bulbs, etc.) Anything you can actually tell it is something you can have in a Routine, and you can have Routines go off at a specific time. (I will note that this is, IMHO, not very well documented. )
posted by mrg at 9:37 AM on May 25, 2022

Best answer: According to Lenovo forums, the only way to set the alarm to play an internet radio is via the voice command, a la

"Set alarm eight aaa-emm and play KCBS Radio"

Assuming "KCBS radio" is one of your radio channels understood by whatever assistant the clock uses.
posted by kschang at 9:46 AM on May 25, 2022

Best answer: Prob better with an example: the Routine that I have that acts as my alarm clock has two Starters - one voice one (because that's a requirement, I never use it) and one time based. Then, it has a bunch of Actions for each thing I want to do. Most of those Actions are of the "Try adding your own" type and are formatted like commands you'd give after an "Ok Google". This isn't one of the pre-set Routines you get - it's one I created from scratch. Notably, modifying the Good Morning one you get with it with the fancy icon does not give you a time-based Starter option. I don't know why this is. But, it also took me a while to realize that the "Try adding your own" option was literally "type the things you'd say to the Googles".

All of my actions are related to setting various things up with light bulbs - because I want different parts of my place to be set to different brightnesses and colors - but notably one is to set the alarm clock's volume up because my "go to sleep" Routine sets the volume down very low. As long as you can make the Google device do it via a voice command, the "Try adding your own" Action should be able to do it - though it may be a bit fiddly to get the right command put in. (Trial and error works here, but something like "play internet radio station XXX" should work straight away.) I can post a screenshot of mine later on if that'd be helpful.
posted by mrg at 9:53 AM on May 25, 2022

The device cannot be my phone. I do not want my phone in my bedroom. As annoying as it may make things like this, this is non-negotiable.

Assuming that "my phone" actually means any phone, could you help us understand what it is about phones that makes you not want one in the bedroom? Because there are masses of small programmable devices that could be pressed into service to achieve the playing of an Internet radio stream at a preset time, but it's pointless suggesting those that have unacceptable feature overlap with phones.
posted by flabdablet at 9:55 AM on May 25, 2022

For example, one obvious solution would be to set up your actual phone to play an Internet radio stream at X time, and have it do that from outside the bedroom while paired with a Bluetooth speaker inside.
posted by flabdablet at 9:59 AM on May 25, 2022

Response by poster: flabdablet - as strange as it sounds in a question about technology in the bedroom, we really try to not have any sophisticated tech in the bedroom. We don't have a TV in there, for instance, and the internet clock radio the SC2 is replacing was literally just that - a clock radio that played the internet radio station that I like to wake up to, and did nothing else outside of being an alarm clock. We are not tech-averse; the rest of our place is filled with smart speakers/lights/thermostats and all that stuff. We just want the bedroom to be a place of quiet and calmness, and a big part of that is having basically no tech in there, other than what we need to wake up in the morning.

mrg - holy crap why didn't I think of that? I just set up a routine like that as a test to confirm it works as I expect. If not I'll try the route kschang suggested.
posted by pdb at 10:03 AM on May 25, 2022

If all else fails, they still sell internet radios, I got one for my birthday and it does just what you’re asking.
posted by hungrytiger at 5:32 PM on May 25, 2022

What you need is a clock radio. Good luck finding one.
posted by Cranberry at 11:49 PM on May 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

we really try to not have any sophisticated tech in the bedroom. We don't have a TV in there, for instance, and the internet clock radio the SC2 is replacing was literally just that

I initially thought it might be something like that, but I don't quite get how a "smart" clock fitted with an always-on corporate surveillance microphone fits within that aesthetic. There's way less tech in a Bluetooth speaker (the simple pairing target kind, not a "smart" speaker with a voice "assistant") than there is in one of those.

In your shoes, I'd be dumping the "smart" clock like the toxic cultural waste I perceive it and similarly equipped devices to be, and searching for somebody who could repair the old internet radio.

Failing that, I'd buy a cheap car Bluetooth to FM radio adapter, wire it to a 12 volt wall wart for power, and pair it with any cheap device that's capable of rendering Internet audio streams; an old phone with no workable battery life remaining would be my first preference, powered from one of the USB sockets on the FM radio adapter. If I did use a phone I'd also open it, remove its SIM card and battery (don't want an old bulging one to burn down my house for me) and disconnect its microphone.

I'd stick that whole setup in a cardboard shoe box somewhere close to but outside the bedroom and run it continuously, thereby creating a hyper-local FM radio station that relays my choice of curated music sources. Then I'd tune a totally old-school FM clock radio inside the bedroom to its transmission channel.

I would never willingly put my own bedroom's privacy one software bug or corporate over-the-air update away from invasion by big tech. Not now, not ever.
posted by flabdablet at 9:08 AM on May 26, 2022 [1 favorite]