How to Use the Sound Recognition Accessibility Feature in iOS 14

[CarlJ]

Except of course there couldn't have been a worse implementation: Why is the phone not flashing? In the dark this would help a lot. Why is the sound so short? I'm looking for my phone, keep it going until I find/move the phone or turn it off on my watch.

Ack, I wouldn’t want it to keep making noise - the noise is annoying but necessary. I generally tap once to get a general bearing (”ah, I must have left it in the kitchen when I went in there for a moment”), then walk closer, and if the phone isn’t immediately apparent, I tap again to get a finer grained idea of where it is - I much prefer this to something that keeps blaring until I turn it off.

And why is the phone not flashing? You don’t seem to be aware that if you hold down the button on the watch, you get flashing as well as noise. They could improve this by flashing the screen as well as the camera flash, to make it show no matter which side is up, but it’s a useful feature as is.

 

[petalino]

Dear Apple: Please add a sound recognition of my wife nagging me so I can then turn it off. That would be swell. ;-)

and add a neat feature to turn off wife or lower her volume...

(sorry, reading wifes; this is only a joke)

 

[spazzcat]

Your iPhone is now a smoke detector?

It can listen for smoke detectors going off...

 

[davester]

It's listed under the "Alarms" section.

that said,if it wouldn’t impact on the form factor, a smoke detector in an iPhone would be an excellent idea

 

[C DM]

that said,if it wouldn’t impact on the form factor, a smoke detector in an iPhone would be an excellent idea

Many other practicalities aside, given that the phone is often inside a pocket or a purse or something else of that nature, even just that would likely not make that something that would be cost effective and all that beneficial to put in.

 

[Robert.Walter]

Needs to be able to be trained.

My deaf mother has a Bosch dishwasher that beeps and shines a red dot in the floor when done. She can’t chat the beep. If the phone could learn this then it would be good. Similarly the buzzer on her dryer. Etc.

 

[Puppuccino]

I would turn this on as it could be quite handy although if it’s listening all the time I’m concerned about battery usage. It’s a tough one.

 

[C DM]

I would turn this on as it could be quite handy although if it’s listening all the time I’m concerned about battery usage. It’s a tough one.

It's likely fairly similar to "Hey Siri" that's been available on decided for some time now.

 

[NightFox]

Anyone else experiencing this? I've had this feature turned on for a few days now (just for the fun of it and to see how it worked), but today it's started tying itself up in a loop. Something activates it, so it gives a notification banner and a 'ping' sound. It hears its own ping sound and thinks it's an appliance (e.g. a microwave going ping) so gives a notification and a ping sound, which it hears and so on and so on.... I think I had a loop of 9 of these before it stopped.

Of course I could just turn the notification ping off (and arguably someone using this feature 'for real' wouldn't benefit from having the notification sound on), but just thought it was interesting that this happened, especially after a few days of working fine. I guess Apple needs to temporarily disable the feature whenever iOS makes a system sound.

 

[CarlJ]

Anyone else experiencing this? I've had this feature turned on for a few days now (just for the fun of it and to see how it worked), but today it's started tying itself up in a loop.

It’s a beta. And they expect/hope you’ll report such issues to Apple. They don’t read these forums.

 

[Andy Madsen]

I agree that this hair could be very useful but I'm wondering if there is more top of. I have it all set up. I was just walking into Wawa with my AirPods ok and evidently an ambulance siren has been recognized by Sound Recognition. I simply got an alert that said "Sound Recognition." I mean Jose am I supposed to know if it's a siren, the dogs barking out the baby crying?

 

[Mattewes]

...
I agree, and you can hold the button in to make the LED light on the phone flash.

wow I never knew this! Cheers for that - every day is a school day