It’s hard to tell whether Tick Talk is actually a functional application or just another novelty item to show off to your friends. Its main purpose is an alarm clock. But, it goes a bit further to also be a talking RSS feed reader. The app works well, but does lack some features and customization that would make it a real winner.

Upon opening the application, you are presented with the alarm time and the actual time. The app keeps your device’s information bar shown at the top, so you get the time twice, which is a little redundant. Setting the alarm time is actually a bit difficult to get the hang of. You have to turn the hour dial on top and the minute dial on the bottom. It just feels awkward. The alarm time is actually shown twice as well. I guess showing things twice is better that just once?

The bottom of the screen reveals the robot, which definitely looks like one of the Transformers. Anyway, you can bring out the robot by waiting for the alarm to go off or by swiping in an upward direction. The robot will speak whatever RSS feed you enter in the settings menu. All you need to do is type in the web address to the feed. You can use a news source and get the latest headlines or a technology website to catch up on what’s new in the tech world. However, you can only add one feed to the app. It would be nice if you were able to add multiple feeds and decide which one to wake up to the next day. Or, maybe have the ability to shuffle feeds and read one after the other.

The settings menu lets you customize the robot’s greeting and “end saying”. I typed in a few different things, including my name, and the robot spoke each one fairly well. The robot’s speech definitely has a British accent and sounds pretty good when reading off the feed. However, there will be times when you won’t understand what he’s saying, as some words just don’t come out clearly.

For what it offers, Tick Talk does its job well. It will wake you up and read the headlines from whatever website you’d like. However, there seems to be a lack of features and user customization that are really becoming standard in alarm clocks and RSS readers. For example, you can only set up one alarm time. Users can always benefit more from the ability to add multiple, recurring alarms for different types of days. Also, there is no option to change the ten-minute snooze time.

Colors schemes are another big customization option available in most applications today. Tick Talk is all black, all the time. The robots eyes and mouth are blue and blue only. Why not offer different color schemes to really make the app look the way the user wants it to look? Maybe in the next update, there will be an option to change the robot’s voice as well!

Overall, Tick Talk is a simple alarm clock and RSS reader, but nothing more. Personally, I wouldn’t want to listen to an annoying robot read off the day’s news headlines when I wake up. Also, would your significant other want to be woken up by an annoying robot voice every morning? That’s something to think about.