Smart Wake Up Alarm
Light-sleep timing, a fade-in alarm, and a silent wrist-tap wake-up.
On this page
Since the app is already listening to your night, it might as well end it well. The built-in wake-up alarm stops the recording when it rings. The Smart Wake Up Alarm can pull the ring time earlier, to a moment when you're sleeping lightly. And a watch on your wrist can do the whole job silently with taps. This page covers all three, plus the backstop behind them.
The wake-up alarm
Set a wake-up time in Settings under Wake Up, pick an alarm sound, and the recording ends with the alarm. One action stops the sound, the taps, and the night's recording all at once. The sound list has five built-in tones, Radar (the default), Classic, Pulse, Bright, and Alert, plus any custom sounds you add.
The alarm fades in. It starts at a clearly audible level and ramps up to full volume over the first few seconds. If you change the alarm settings mid-night, they apply to the running recording right away. No restart needed.
Wake up to your own sound
You can wake up to a song, a voice, or any clip you like. Tap Add your own alarm at the bottom of the sound list and choose where the sound comes from:
- Import a file from Files, iCloud Drive, or a download. The file can run up to 10 minutes.
- Record a sound through the microphone, for up to two minutes. Record your own voice, or switch to another app, play a song on the speaker, then come back and tap Done. Recording is only available while no overnight session is running.
Next, drag the two handles around the part you want. The loop can run from 1 to 60 seconds, and it repeats until you stop the alarm. Pause between repeats adds a second of quiet before each repeat so a short clip doesn't feel frantic. It's on by default. Play Preview loop to hear the result, give the sound a name, and tap Save.
You can keep up to 10 custom sounds. They show up in the wake-up alarm list and in the Snore Nudge list, and each one picks its sound separately. Touch and hold a custom sound to rename or delete it. If you delete the sound an alarm or nudge was using, it goes back to its default tone. If a custom sound ever fails to play at alarm time, the alarm rings with a built-in tone, so you still wake up.
Recording from a speaker in the room comes out clearer than recording from the phone's own speaker. Music from Apple Music or Spotify can't be imported directly, since those apps protect their files, so play the song and record it instead.
Smart Wake Up Alarm: waking in light sleep
Getting yanked out of deep sleep is what makes some mornings feel like surfacing from the bottom of a pool. The Smart Wake Up Alarm gives you 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 when you're sleeping lightly and rings then.
It decides using the same live sleep staging behind Sleep Insights, plus the most reliable leading signal there is, which is your own movement and sounds. Stirring or murmuring inside the window can set the alarm off right away, since you're already surfacing. A light-sleep reading on its own is treated more cautiously and only fires in the later part of the window, so the alarm can't keep costing you half your window every night. A confident deep-sleep reading holds it back.
If no good moment comes along, you lose nothing. The alarm rings at your set time like a normal alarm would. When the Smart Wake Up Alarm does fire early, the wake-up notification and the next morning's summary both tell you.
The Smart Wake Up Alarm needs Sleep Insights turned on, because without the stage engine there's nothing to time the wake against. Settings warns you in both places if one is on without the other. While it's armed, the lock screen's Live Activity shows the alarm with its window, for example "6:30 – 7:00 AM".
Silent alarm: wrist taps on your watch
With a watch on your wrist, the alarm can reach you as taps instead of sound, so you wake up and your partner doesn't. Turn on Wrist nudge on Apple Watch in the Wake Up settings (it reads Wrist nudge on your watch when you've set up another brand) and at alarm time you get 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 the taps alongside the alarm sound as backup, or on their own 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. On an Apple Watch, the option shows up once the watch is paired, and setting its haptics to Prominent, in the Watch app on your iPhone, makes the taps a lot firmer.
Huawei, Garmin, Fitbit, Amazfit, Xiaomi, Withings, Polar, Suunto, COROS, and most other watches that show iPhone notifications can deliver the taps too. With no Apple Watch paired, a Not Using an Apple Watch? row in the Wake Up settings walks you through the setup. It's the same setup as Snore Nudge, covered in Wrist taps on other watches. On those watches, the watch's own Do Not Disturb or sleep mode has to be off at night, or the alarm taps stay silent.
The backstop
A fair worry about an alarm inside a recording app is what happens if the recording dies overnight. So there's 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 gets cancelled before you ever see it. If something silenced the app overnight, the backstop still gets you up.
In silent wrist-tap mode the backstop stays silent too. You get a tap instead of a blast, so the whole point of not waking your partner holds up even when something goes wrong.