How to Make Your IPhone Hear the Doorbell, Your Pet, and Other Important Sounds
Do you sometimes miss the doorbell or knock on the door because you are wearing headphones? Not everyone knows this, but iPhone settings have a built-in sound recognition feature . By default, this feature, which is located in the Accessibility section of System Preferences, notifies you every time a certain sound is heard, but you can take it a step further by activating a shortcut.
Please note that Apple’s documentation clearly states that this feature should not be relied upon “for recognizing sounds in circumstances where you may be harmed or injured, in high-risk or emergency situations, or for navigation.” However, if the rates are lower, it may keep you from missing out.
To get started, open System Settings and select Accessibility > Audio Recognition . Enable this feature.
From here, you can choose which sounds you want the phone to listen to passively. The default list includes alarms, pets, and various household sounds such as a boiling kettle or a knock on the door. You can enable sounds and receive a notification every time your iPhone “notices” a sound. You can also train your phone to recognize your specific appliances and alarms. This guided process means that the alarm goes off repeatedly so that your phone learns to recognize it.
As I mentioned earlier, you can also use this feature to launch Apple Shortcuts . The only limitation here is the shortcut you can create. For example, you can track how many times a day you boil a kettle of water or how often your neighbor’s dog barks. Or you could, like me, just set your phone to talk to you every time a fairly ordinary thing happens because you think it’s funny.
To get started, open the Shortcuts app on your phone and go to the Automation tab. Scroll down to the very bottom and you will see Audio Recognition . You can choose which sound triggers the automation and which shortcut you want to launch.
Note that you can add as many automations as you like, meaning you can trigger different keyboard shortcuts for different sounds. Use this new power wisely.