I recently saw an ad for the huawei talkband b1, and despite never using my phone for voice calls, it seems to have a good combination of better non-intrusive alerting and mono-aural input for directions / updates / verbose messages.

Android has Talkback text-to-speech accessibility support for incoming messages, which is overkill for this as tts is only needed for two operations. So it looks like one needs to write a quick app or two for this.

Using a wrist-wearable for health monitoring apparently doesn't work well, so it's probably best to just avoid those notions. Using voice as a nudge, though, seems like a win.

On a semi-related parting note, there seems to be a viral interjection meme going around. One of my co-workers started saying "eh" when lifting something. And then I started saying it. And now I notice other people doing it. Is this just some form of availability bias? Or perhaps voice is more nudge-worthy than we expect?