Your watch becomes the controller. Flick, push or reach and the watch fires whatever you wired to that motion: a sound, a spoken phrase, a media key, a lighting cue. Tap the face instead if your hands are busy. Your phone stays in your pocket while you coach, present, or ask for something out loud.
Closed beta
Wristcue is a standalone Wear OS app. It watches the accelerometer for seven deliberate motions, and each one can fire any combination of four things: a sound, a spoken phrase, a native watch action such as a media key or launching an app, and an HTTP request to something on your network. All of that runs on the watch itself, with your phone in your pocket.
The app ships with seeded profiles already wired up. Swipe the watch face to switch between them, and the profile's wiring decides what the face becomes: wire a scoreboard and you get a tappable scoreboard, wire several spoken phrases and you get a phrase board.
Tap a phrase and the watch says it aloud through on-device text to speech: Yes, No, Help please, Bathroom please. It works in any language the watch has installed, and the phrases are yours to write. This is the profile I care most about getting right.
A loud whistle and a stadium air horn on a gesture, spoken calls like Timeout and Water break, a live tappable Home/Away scoreboard that announces the score, and a work/rest interval timer for drills.
Flick for next and previous slide, raise to play or pause a video, and run a silent graduated talk timer that buzzes your wrist at milestones. The timing stays on your wrist, so the room just sees you talking.
A coach's watch can broadcast to the others: a whistle, a horn, a spoken call, a typed phrase or a countdown. An interval timer becomes something a whole class feels on their wrists at the same instant, wherever they are standing in the gym.
Each gesture can also send an HTTP request you define, so it drives WLED strips, Hue, Home Assistant scenes, an ESP32 you built, or an IFTTT applet. Each row has a Test button so you find out it works before you are standing in front of anyone. There's a media remote profile too: play, skip, volume, on the watch or the phone.
A gesture detector that works for the person who wrote it is easy. One that works for a stranger with a different arm, a different watch and a different idea of what "a flick" means is the actual problem.
The watch records you performing the gesture, then aims that detector at the accelerometer channel your motion actually drove. Axes get measured per device, because a watch worn on the other wrist, or a person who flicks from the elbow rather than the wrist, lands the same intent on a different axis.
The watch runs a small web server and hands the interface to a browser, because editing anything complicated on a watch screen is miserable. Open it on any phone on the same Wi‑Fi, enter the six-digit pairing PIN the watch shows, and you get a full control panel: buttons, automations, sequences, sound library, calibration, display and settings. The phone app is the same panel in a wrapper. Everything stays on the local network.
There are seven detectable gestures: Flick Up, Flick Down, Drop, Push, Grip, Reach and Pull, plus a double-tap that arms and disarms without touching the screen. You choose how many are active and which. Each count from one to seven keeps its own layout, so a three-button setup gets an arrangement chosen for three, while a gesture's sound and actions follow it wherever it appears.
Kotlin and Jetpack Compose on Wear Material 3, running standalone on the watch, with a phone companion also in Kotlin. Built and tested on a Galaxy Watch 7. It ships with a ten-sound starter bank licensed royalty-free, pre-assigned so a fresh install makes noise immediately, and every one of them can be replaced with your own upload.
Wristcue is in closed beta and is not on the Play Store yet, so there is nothing to download from here. The plan is a free download where you buy how many gesture buttons you want active, and owning any one of them gives you every capability. The site at wristcue.app is live.
The Communicate profile speaks stored phrases on a tap, which overlaps with what an AAC device does. I want to be careful about that claim: Wristcue is a consumer app on a consumer watch, it has not been evaluated by anyone clinical, and it is not a medical device or a substitute for one. What it is, honestly, is a fast way to put a handful of phrases somewhere you can reach them without a phone.