How to Enable and Customise Sound Notifications on Android to Detect Critical Environmental Sounds

Smartphones are traditionally designed to emit sounds to get our attention. However, for people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or routinely wearing noise-cancelling headphones while working, external environmental audio cues often go unnoticed. Failing to hear a critical auditory alert—such as a building fire alarm, a crying baby, a knocking door, or a running tap—can result in safety hazards or domestic damage. To bridge this accessibility divide, Google integrated Sound Notifications into Android. Using on-device machine learning, Sound Notifications continuously monitors ambient room audio, identifies critical sounds, and alerts you with visual flashes, haptic vibrations, and smart notifications.

What Are Android Sound Notifications and How Do They Work?

Sound Notifications is part of Google’s suite of accessibility services (packaged alongside Live Transcribe). The feature runs acoustic detection models entirely locally on your smartphone processor:

• Privacy-Preserving Architecture: Ambient microphone audio is analysed on-device in temporary memory buffers. Raw audio is never recorded, saved to storage, or transmitted to Google cloud servers.
• Broad Category Detection: Recognises critical emergency warnings (smoke alarms, fire sirens), domestic priority sounds (baby crying, dog barking, doorbell ringing, door knocking), and appliance alerts (water running, appliance beeping).
• Multi-Sensory Alerts: Alerts you via push notification banners, intense vibration rhythms, and pulsing camera LED light flashes.
• Wear OS Integration: Forwards sound alerts directly to your paired Wear OS smartwatch, vibrating your wrist even when your phone is in another room.

Compatibility and Installation

Sound Notifications is built natively into Google Pixel devices running Android 12 or newer. On Samsung Galaxy and other Android smartphones running Android 6.0+, the capability can be activated by installing the official Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications application from the Google Play Store.

How to Enable Sound Notifications on Android

Follow these steps to configure environmental sound recognition:

1. Launch the Settings app on your Android smartphone.
2. Scroll down and tap on Accessibility.
3. Select Sound Notifications (or Hearing enhancements > Sound Notifications on Samsung One UI).
4. Tap Open Sound Notifications.
5. Grant microphone permissions when prompted to allow the acoustic engine to monitor ambient frequencies.
6. Tap Turn on to start the service.

Customising Monitored Sound Categories

To avoid notification fatigue from everyday non-critical household noises, customise which sounds trigger alerts:

1. In the Sound Notifications dashboard, tap the Settings (Gear) icon in the top-right corner.
2. Tap Sound notifications are active to view detection categories:
   • Emergency: Smoke and fire alarms, sirens. (Keep these enabled at all times).
   • Priority: Baby sounds, dog barking, door knocks, doorbells.
   • Appliances & Other: Running water, appliance beeping, landline phone ringing.
3. Toggle off any category that does not apply to your environment (for instance, disable Dog barking if you live in a multi-pet household).

Configuring Flash Alerts and Vibration Pulses

If you wear heavy over-ear headphones or leave your phone face-down on a desk, configure visual and tactile alert triggers:

1. Inside the Sound Notifications settings menu, scroll to Notification methods.
2. Toggle on Vibrate to ensure distinct tactile pulses accompany alerts.
3. Toggle on Camera flash or Screen flash. When an emergency sound like a smoke alarm triggers, your camera LED light blinks brightly, illuminating your room.

Reviewing the Historical Sound Timeline

If you stepped away from your desk and noticed an alert banner, you can inspect the historical audio timeline:

1. Open the Sound Notifications app or tap the persistent status bar icon.
2. The app displays a chronological timeline of detected acoustic events over the past 24 hours, recording the precise timestamp and duration of alarms, knocks, or crying sounds.

Adding a Quick Settings Shortcut

To toggle Sound Notifications on or off when leaving home or arriving at work, add a quick tile to your system shade:

1. Swipe down twice from the top of your display to open the full Quick Settings tray.
2. Tap the Pencil (Edit) icon.
3. Locate the Sound Notifications tile in the inactive list and drag it into your active grid.

You can now arm or disarm environmental listening with a single tap.