Battery Voice – Speaks your Phone’s Battery Level with Shaker Detection

Wow, a real amount of new accelerometer supporting projects that I can present you these days.

Although “Battery Voice” is not as cool as the great “NokoShop”, I want to briefly inform you about a new application which combines a useful function, which everybody needs in the daily use with their S60 phones, with shaker detection.

The purpose of “Battery Voice” is to inform the user about the current battery level: After shaking your phone, the application will start to play a sound created with a text-to-speech engine saying: “Battery with x levels of charge”.

The concept could be really useful for people who visually impaired. For all other people, “Battery Voice” seems to be just a gadget, because I think everybody would prefer to just have a look at the battery level display top left which every S60 shows in every menu and submenu.

You may think that it could also be useful for applications using a full screen mode like games, but in my opinion it’s just the better way to press to times on the menu key to return to the standby screen and minimize the application.

To be really useful for you, shaker detection must still be improved a lot. The application didn’t recognize 90% of my shakers, that’s rather disappointing.
Also the voice doesn’t speak very clear, many people will have problem to understand the number of levels your phone still has when the voice is talking.

Anyway, another nice example in how many different ways we can use accelerometer technology. “Battery Voice” is a funny application which won’t be useful in daily use, but is quite fun to use.

You can download the application here. Make sure to install “Python” and the libraries which are all included into the file. The folders “Images” and “Sounds” must be copied into the folder “Others” on your phone’s memory card.

Tip: If you don’t like the default sound files, you can easily replace them with new ones by changing their names to those that the existing ones have.