SoundWatch

Makeability Lab - University of Washington

About this app

DISCLAIMER: SoundWatch is a research prototype maintained by a team of student researchers at the University of Washington, and not a finished product. We try our best, but due to the volume of the emails we receive, we may not be able to respond to every query on time. But, every feedback matters, so please continue to share your experience and any improvement suggestions, so we can eventually get to these messages and improve SoundWatch.
Note: A Google Wear OS smartwatch is required for this app. Some options you can use include: Ticwatch Pro 3, Fossil watches, and Moto 360. Samsung watches are not compatible since they use a different OS, called Tizen, which has less support for third party apps. Learn more here.

We bring you SoundWatch, a smartwatch based app that provides glanceable, always-available sound feedback for the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing.

Created by a diverse team at University of Washington and led by a hard-of-hearing innovator who wanted to build for his community, SoundWatch uses machine learning to alert its users to important sounds occurring in their environment.

With everything from critical fire alarms to speech alerts, users know they can rely on SoundWatch to make their environment more accessible. In the spirit of innovation and the spread of knowledge, SmartWatch is freely available and open-sourced for anyone wanting to learn more and contribute to its development.

Ratings and reviews

Great idea, but a little over-enthusiastic. Its picking up ambient noise like thinking the nearby busy road is soft speech and interpreting the pan on the stove as "door in use", even after I turn off that sound on the phone. I think it will be good if it is less sensitive and if it fine tunes its sounds over time. I would love this app for all the sounds I dont hear! I did uninstall for now because it was constantly alerting and I thought it would run down my battery.

Interesting how the app works to be able to recognize the sounds. It's still in its early phase with just the smart watch working but I notice the phone option so maybe it will be implemented in the future.

What a great idea!! Please make this work on Garmin and other watches. I would love to be able to use this app on my smart watch but it has a different OS. I am hearing impaired and I can see so many potential benefits. If you ever need an official tester...I'm game!

What's new

Add a slider to adjust the sound levels as user requests.