You can set up your iPhone so it listens for sounds like doorbells, glass breaking or a baby crying, and then alert you with a tone or a vibration.
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Video Summary
In This Tutorial
How to use the iPhone's Sound Recognition feature to have your phone listen for specific sounds like a doorbell, a baby crying, or glass breaking, and alert you with a tone or vibration.
Intro
- The iPhone can listen for specific environmental sounds and alert you to them, which is especially useful for those with hearing difficulties since the phone can vibrate or play a tone louder than the original sound.
Turning On Sound Recognition
- Sound Recognition is found in Settings, Accessibility, Hearing, Sound Recognition, where you turn it on and choose which sounds the phone should listen for from a variety of options.
Choosing Sounds and Alerts
- After picking a sound such as baby crying, you are warned that "Hey Siri" will not work while Sound Recognition is on, and you can choose what happens when the sound is heard, selecting an alert tone or ringtone, or setting the tone to None and using a vibration instead.
- Vibration alerts can use one of the included patterns or a custom pattern you create by tapping out the rhythm, and different sounds such as glass breaking, water running, doorbell, door knock, and dog barking can each be enabled with their own alerts.
Testing the Feature
- Testing with recorded sounds played from a computer triggered most alerts, though some like glass breaking took several tries, suggesting recorded sounds are less reliable than real ones; a real running sink down the hall was still detected after a few seconds.
- It is recommended to test the sounds you intend to rely on, especially easy-to-recreate ones like a doorbell, to confirm how well they work in your own environment before depending on them.
Summary
The iPhone's Sound Recognition feature, found under Accessibility, can listen for a range of sounds and alert you with a chosen tone or vibration, providing helpful hearing assistance, though it should be tested in your own situation before being relied upon.
Video Transcript
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the sound recognition feature on your iPhone.
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So your iPhone has a really cool feature you may not know about. It can listen for specific sounds in your environment and then alert you to them. Of course if you can't hear the sound you may not be able to hear the actual alert. But you can have your phone vibrate, even do a custom vibration if it hears that sounds, and then glance at the screen to see what's going on.
So you'll find this by going into Settings and then go down to Accessibility. In here go to the Hearing Section and Sound Recognition. Here's where you can turn it on. Now you have to select which sounds it should listen to. Go here and you can see there are a whole variety of different sounds. So you turn on the ones that you want it to listen for and give you an alert when it hears it.
So let's pick one like baby crying. Let's turn that On. Now the first time you turn one of these on it's going to warn you that Hey Siri is not going to work if you're using Sound Recognition. Now you get to pick what happens when it hears the sound. So you can select here and you can pick which Alert Tones to use or any ringtone that you have on your phone. Now if you have your phone turned up enough, of course, your phone could actually be a lot louder in alerting you to this than the actual sound itself. So that could be useful. However, if you'd rather just have it vibrate and warn you that something is going on you can set this to None. Now you can go to Vibration and here you can set the type of vibration. So there are a bunch of different ones that you can use that are included with your phone. You could also create a custom one. A custom one you just create by tapping in the pattern you want it to vibrate and then it records it. I've recorded a few custom ones here. So we're just going to use the quick default one there.
Now we can go back and we've got Baby Crying turned on. Let's turn on some other ones as well. I'm going to turn On glass breaking and I can set that to something. I'm going to turn on water running. I'm going to turn on doorbell, that's definitely a useful one. Door knock as well. Let's also turn on dog barking. So all of those are going to play a sound except that first one, the baby crying is actually going to do a vibration. So now that we've got it turned on we can try it out. I've got some sounds here I can play on my Mac that hopefully will trigger these. Let's try the baby crying. So you can see it recognized that and the phone did vibrate. We can Dismiss that notification. Let's go and try dog barking. It got that as well. Door knocking. It got that. Try the doorbell. It got that. Let's see if glass breaking triggers it. So it seems like the sound I had there didn't work for that. Let's try water. That one did get triggered. Let's try some other glass breaking sounds. Eventually it did get there and triggered the alert for glass breaking. Maybe using recorded sounds aren't the best way to trigger these. Maybe they work a lot better for the real sound playing out nearby.
I tried it by turning on the sink all the way down the hall and it was much quieter than when I was playing a sound on my computer. But yet it still picked it up after a few seconds. So these can definitely be useful for those needing some hearing assistance in having the phone vibrate when it hears one of these sounds or simply play some sort of ringtone at a louder volume than the sound. What I would recommend doing is trying them out especially for things that are easy to recreate like a doorbell sound and see how well they work in your situation before relying on them.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
This is an intriguing feature I never imagined and it also appears to work on iPad.
Is there a way to have the alerts play through a bluetooth device, like a hearing aid?
Chris: I think they are just normal notifications. So if you have normal notifications play through something, then these should too. But experiment and see.
Interesting. I didn’t know the options existed. Because I wouldn’t want to sacrifice using Siri, or remembering to turn it on/off, I don’t think it would be useful for me. Good presentation nonetheless.
Jim: You can still use Siri, just not "Hey Siri."
After I set up sound recognition for door knocking, it didn't seem to be working. With a little research, I discovered that I had it turned off in the Control Center. I also discovered that it will not work if you have Do Not Disturb turned on. A couple of settings to keep in mind if you are using Sound Recognition.