Never Miss Your Doorbell While Wearing Headphones on iPhone

[MacRumors]

Noise-canceling headphones are great for blocking out distractions, but they can also block out sounds you actually need to hear, like a courier at the front door with your all-important package. Well, thanks to an Apple accessibility feature, your iPhone can do the listening for you and alert you when your doorbell rings.

Meet Sound Recognition, the feature in question that uses your iPhone's microphone to continuously monitor for specific sounds. When it detects one, you'll receive a notification that plays through your connected headphones, along with a vibration on your iPhone (or Apple Watch if you're wearing one).

The feature is primarily designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but it's equally useful for anyone who works from home and regularly wears AirPods or noise-canceling headphones.

How to Enable Doorbell Alerts

1. Open Settings on your iPhone.
2. Tap Accessibility.
3. Under "Hearing," tap Sound & Name Recognition, then tap through to Sound Recognition.
   
   
   
   Toggle on Sound Recognition, then tap Sounds.
4. Under "Household," tap Door Bell and toggle it on in the next screen. You'll also see the option to choose a specific alert tone.
   
   

Note that your iPhone may need to download a small file (around 30MB) before the feature becomes active, so a Wi-Fi or data connection could be needed.

Training Your iPhone to Recognize Your Doorbell

If your iPhone doesn't reliably detect your specific doorbell, you can train it to recognize the sound by following these steps:

1. 
   Go to Settings ➝ Accessibility ➝ Sound & Name Recognition ➝ Sound Recognition ➝ Sounds.
2. Tap Custom Appliance or Doorbell, then enter a name.
3. Place your iPhone near the doorbell and tap Start Listening.
4. Ring your doorbell. Repeat this five times to complete the training.

Quick Access via Control Center

Once Sound Recognition is enabled, iOS automatically adds a toggle to Control Center. From here, you can press and hold the Sound Recognition icon to quickly enable or disable specific sounds without diving into Settings, which is handy if you only want doorbell detection when you're at home wearing headphones.

Sound Recognition can also detect smoke alarms, dog barking, babies crying, water running, and more. Just keep in mind that Apple advises against relying on this feature in high-risk or emergency situations.

Article Link: Never Miss Your Doorbell While Wearing Headphones on iPhone

 

[matttarantino]

Imagine when the apple doorbell can tell you exactly who is at the door and you get notified via your airpods

 

[kenta_]

Imagine when the apple doorbell can tell you exactly who is at the door and you get notified via your airpods

My unifi doorbell already does that.

 

[Rychiar]

can you make a HomePod listen for specific sounds like this? I'd like my kitchen HomePod to know when my fridge is beeping since the door always gets stuck

 

[anakin44011]

How about a feature that recognizes my wife's voice, especially when she calls my name while not knowing that I am wearing AirPods...then gets frustrated when I don't answer.

I'm actually not kidding. I listen to podcasts, etc while doing household chores and I can only wear one AirPod because I also have to listen for voices calling me.

God forbid I put that second AirPod in while running a blender or other loud appliance, then forget to remove it...my wife has a hidden sense and calls my name every time...it never fails.🤣

 

[cjsuk]

Imagine when the apple doorbell can tell you exactly who is at the door and you get notified via your airpods

I think this is creepy as ****. They already started repurposing Ring as a surveillance network.

I've got an analogue video entry phone that makes enough noise that you can hear it listening to black metal with the airpods in and noise cancellation on.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

I think this is creepy as ****. They already started repurposing Ring as a surveillance network.

I've got an analogue video entry phone that makes enough noise that you can hear it listening to black metal with the airpods in and noise cancellation on.

Wife said the same thing when we saw the Ring Super Bowl commercial with the lost dogs.

No thank you.

 

[recurringdream]

Noise-canceling headphones are great for blocking out distractions, but they can also block out sounds you actually need to hear, like a courier at the front door with your all-important package. Well, thanks to an Apple accessibility feature, your iPhone can do the listening for you and alert you when your doorbell rings.

Meet Sound Recognition, the feature in question that uses your iPhone's microphone to continuously monitor for specific sounds. When it detects one, you'll receive a notification that plays through your connected headphones, along with a vibration on your iPhone (or Apple Watch if you're wearing one).

The feature is primarily designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but it's equally useful for anyone who works from home and regularly wears AirPods or noise-canceling headphones.

How to Enable Doorbell Alerts

1. Open Settings on your iPhone.
   
2. Tap Accessibility.
   
3. Under "Hearing," tap Sound & Name Recognition, then tap through to Sound Recognition.
   
   
   
   Toggle on Sound Recognition, then tap Sounds.
   
4. Under "Household," tap Door Bell and toggle it on in the next screen. You'll also see the option to choose a specific alert tone.
   
   

Note that your iPhone may need to download a small file (around 30MB) before the feature becomes active, so a Wi-Fi or data connection could be needed.

Training Your iPhone to Recognize Your Doorbell

If your iPhone doesn't reliably detect your specific doorbell, you can train it to recognize the sound by following these steps:

1. 
   Go to Settings ➝ Accessibility ➝ Sound & Name Recognition ➝ Sound Recognition ➝ Sounds.
   
2. Tap Custom Appliance or Doorbell, then enter a name.
   
3. Place your iPhone near the doorbell and tap Start Listening.
   
4. Ring your doorbell. Repeat this five times to complete the training.

Quick Access via Control Center

Once Sound Recognition is enabled, iOS automatically adds a toggle to Control Center. From here, you can press and hold the Sound Recognition icon to quickly enable or disable specific sounds without diving into Settings, which is handy if you only want doorbell detection when you're at home wearing headphones.

Sound Recognition can also detect smoke alarms, dog barking, babies crying, water running, and more. Just keep in mind that Apple advises against relying on this feature in high-risk or emergency situations.

Article Link: Never Miss Your Doorbell While Wearing Headphones on iPhone

I already have this feature in my home. It's called "having a Terrier".

 

[KeepCalmPeople]

Amazing - Apple creates problems while trying to solve problems, and then solves the problems they create.

I'm sure the list of things that you would actually want to be able to hear is quite long, such as the sound of breaking glass, gunfire etc. Trying to 'whitelist' all of those is quite the challenge. AI to the rescue? It never ends...

 

[Windoes]

Doesn’t work much with a door knocker

 

[CarletonTorpin]

Great featured image for this article. Kudos to the creator of it.

 

[giggles]

So this is about legacy doorbells, but what about doing something about Apple Home smart doorbells? I constantly miss them while wearing AirPods because the sound they make on the iPhone it’s just the sound of a regular notification. Make them distinctive and unmissable.

 

[cjboffoli97]

I wear APP3s pretty much all day, every day (I have ASD so I'm sensitive to sound and live in a loud city). As such, I've definitely missed the doorbell on some occasions as the ANC of the AirPods is very effective. So this doorbell listening feature is interesting. Though I wonder what bearing ite might have on battery life.

One of the ingenious engineering tricks with the AirPods was the way they got around the necessity of having the microphone on and always listening for the user to speak (for Siri, etc.), which would be really taxing for the battery. Apparently the solve was to use the built-in accelerometer (which uses far less power than the microphones) to detect the minute vibrations that happen in your skull when you begin to speak, which triggers the microphone to turn on only when it is needed.

 

[Timpetus]

I'm not putting my headphones on my iPhone. They go on/in my ears.

I do have a system of cameras and a smart doorbell, so I don't need this feature, but it's neat that it's available for those who do!

 

[carrrrrlos]

I wear headphones to miss the doorbell.

 

[tonmischa]

I LOVE these helpful articles!
Thanks for making people aware of these very helpful features!

 

[Damian83]

Imagine when the apple doorbell can tell you exactly who is at the door and you get notified via your airpods

and automatically block it if its police 😂

 

[amancalledsun]

can you make a HomePod listen for specific sounds like this? I'd like my kitchen HomePod to know when my fridge is beeping since the door always gets stuck

It would actually be great if it could do this for just notifications. i.e. my doorbell rang while I wasn't home.

 

[newtestleper]

Go for it if you like this staring at you.

 

[ResolutionNZ]

How about a feature that recognizes my wife's voice, especially when she calls my name while not knowing that I am wearing AirPods...then gets frustrated when I don't answer.

I'm actually not kidding. I listen to podcasts, etc while doing household chores and I can only wear one AirPod because I also have to listen for voices calling me.

God forbid I put that second AirPod in while running a blender or other loud appliance, then forget to remove it...my wife has a hidden sense and calls my name every time...it never fails.🤣

Get yourselves both apple watches, listen to your podcasts via your watch and use the walkie talkie feature so your wife can speak to you whenever she wants without finding you --> problem solved.

 

[svish]

Good article. Sound recognition is a very useful feature. Have turned off active noise cancellation in the past in these situations. Will give this method a try.