Talking Clock

It’s important to be aware of the exact time and date to be able to achieve maximum performance and efficiency in your work. Clocks can be found in all environments, and come in different shapes and styles. For instance, Talking Clock is a pretty helpful little tool which aims to regularly tell you what time it is.

A cool advantage here is the lack of a setup process, which means you can take it for a spin as soon as download is done. This makes it the perfect tool to carry around on a thumb drive, taking up little space. It doesn’t leave any traces on the computer you use it on, so you don’t have to worry that registry entries get damaged.

The visual design is nothing to make it stand out from the crowd. The application wraps all of its features in a clean window frame, with most of the space representing a clock on a black background. Unfortunately, there’s no possibility to change the background, or the digit color shown in the clock.

Interacting with the clock speaks the current time. A right-click on the window brings up the settings panel with various options to configure. These come in three forms, such as talking frequency, advanced, and other settings. Frequency can mean no speaking, repeating as often as possible, or every minute, 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, and every hour.

Advanced settings help you decide whether you want a 12 or 24 hour clock, both of them being spoken. There’s the possibility to adjust prefix and suffix sound files, and you can also have Windows Recorder brought up to create your own effects. Sadly, you can’t send the program to the tray area.

Bottom line is that Talking Clock is a decent method of always staying updated on time and date without having to look at the clock. It could have used more voice options, but there are enough settings to configure quality, playback frequency, and even capture your own effect sounds.