I made something like that about fifteen years ago. It displayed "A little after two", "A quarter past three", and such. It wasn't an e-ink device; the display was vacuum-fluorescent. So it needed a power cable to a wall wart. I wanted to build one that would run for a year on a battery, like an ordinary clock, but e-ink displays were too costly back then.

The idea is from an old New Yorker cartoon, where someone is looking in the window of a clock store, and sees a long, narrow clock displaying "A little after three".

Today, of course, it has to be "cloud enabled".