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Bisei-Tokei Voice Actress Clock Phone App Launched

Not-So-Daily Link of the Day: The official blog for the Bijin-Tokei clock program has confirmed on Monday that Bisei-Tokei, a spinoff clock that tells time with the photos and voices of 12 seiyū (voice actresses), is now available on Apple's iTunes Store in Japan and the United States. Like the original Bijin-Tokei (Beauty-Clock) program, Bisei-Tokei (Beautiful-Seiyū-Clock) automatically displays a new photograph of one of the women every minute of the day — 1,440 photographs in all.

Unlike Bijin-Tokei, users of Bisei-Tokei can have the seiyū speaking the time of day out loud, too. The app can also have the seiyū speaking one of 96 different lines of dialogue every 15 minutes, and the users can set an alarm with the voice of any of the seiyū. Each seiyū speaks in two kinds of character voices — ganbariya (encouraging and supportive) or tsundere (aloof and abrasive, but secretly kind-hearted) — so the app effectively has 24 characters.

The following seiyū from the Aoni Production agency are in the app:

• Ai Nonaka (Bincho-tan's title character)
• Yui Kano (Sumomomo Momomo's Momoko Kuzuryu)
• Akemi Kanda (Negima!'s Asuna Kagurazaka)
• Ryō Hirohashi (Kaleido Star's Sora Naegino)
• Masumi Asano (Sugar: A Little Snow Fairy's Saga Bergman)
• Tomoko Kaneda (Azumanga Daioh's Chiyo Mihama)
• Satomi Satou (K-ON!'s Ritsu Tainaka)
• Houko Kuwashima (Martian Successor Nadesico's Yurika Misumaru)
• Mai Aizawa (Lucky Star's Ayano Minegishi)
• Yuka Saitou (Seitokai no Ichizon's Chizuru Akaba)
• Ryoko Shiraishi (Hayate the Combat Butler's Hayate Ayasaki)
• Kanae Itō (Shugo Chara!'s Amu Hinamori/Dia)

While the app is available immediately for the iPhone and iPod touch mobile devices, the producers plan to release an similar program for the DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank mobile phones in Japan through the Dwango content provider in early February.

Besides the original Bijin-Tokei and Bisei-Tokei, the creators launched a male spinoff called Binan-Tokei last year, although Binan-Tokei is only in Japanese for now. Versions for the Japanese "gal" sub-culture, France, and South Korea are also planned for release. In the announcement of the Bijin-Tokei iPhone app, the producers say that they are planning two more Bijin-Tokei editions with different female seiyū casts, as well as a male seiyū version.