End the night on your terms: light-sleep timing, a fade-in alarm, and silent wrist-tap wake.
Since the app is already listening to your night, it can also end it well. The built-in wake-up alarm stops the recording when it rings, Smart Wake can pull the ring time earlier to a moment you are sleeping lightly, and an Apple Watch can carry the whole job silently through wrist taps. This page covers all three layers and the guarantee behind them.
Set a wake-up time in Settings under Wake Up, pick an alarm sound, and the recording session ends with the alarm: one action stops the sound, the taps, and the night's recording together.
The alarm fades in rather than blasting: it starts at a clearly audible level and ramps to full volume over the first seconds. If you changed the alarm settings mid-night, they apply to the running recording immediately, no restart needed.
Waking out of deep sleep is what makes some mornings feel like surfacing from the bottom of a pool. Smart Wake gives the alarm a window instead of a deadline: choose 15, 30, or 45 minutes, and inside that window before your set time, the app looks for a moment you are sleeping lightly and rings then.
It decides using the same live sleep staging that powers Sleep Insights, plus the most reliable leading signal there is: your own movement and sounds. Stirring or murmuring inside the window can trigger the alarm right away, since you are already surfacing. A light-sleep reading alone is treated more conservatively and only fires in the later part of the window, so the alarm cannot systematically cost you half your window every night. A confident deep-sleep reading holds the alarm back.
If no good moment arrives, nothing is lost: the alarm rings at your set time exactly as a normal alarm would. When Smart Wake does fire early, the wake-up notification and the next morning's summary both say so.
Smart Wake needs Sleep Insights turned on, since without the stage engine there is nothing to time the wake against. Settings warns you in both places if one is on without the other. While armed, the lock screen's Live Activity shows the alarm with its window, for example "6:30 – 7:00 AM".
With an Apple Watch on your wrist, the alarm can reach you as taps instead of sound, so you wake and a partner does not. Enable Wrist nudge on Apple Watch in the Wake Up settings and the alarm time delivers a steady rhythm of taps, a few seconds apart, in two waves over about six minutes so a deep sleeper gets a second chance.
You can run taps alongside the alarm sound as a reinforcement, or alone as a fully silent alarm. Dismissing the notification on the watch stops everything, sound, taps, and recording, and just unlocking your iPhone counts as "awake" and cancels the rest. A Test button in Settings lets you feel the tap pattern; lock the phone after tapping it, since iOS only mirrors notifications to the watch while the phone is locked.
This works with the watch app closed and the phone locked, and the option only appears when a watch is paired. Setting the watch's haptics to Prominent, in the Watch app on your iPhone, makes the taps considerably firmer.
An alarm inside a recording app raises a fair question: what if the recording dies overnight? The answer is a backstop. When you arm the alarm, the app also schedules an independent system alarm slightly after your wake time, through iOS's alarm framework on recent versions and a time-sensitive notification on older ones. If the app fires your alarm normally, the backstop is cancelled before you ever see it; if anything silenced the app overnight, the backstop still gets you up.
In silent wrist-tap mode the backstop stays silent too, a tap rather than a blast, so the whole point of not waking a partner survives the failure case.
