How To Enable ‘Water Running’ Notification On iOS 14?

One of the coolest iOS 14 features that Apple added this year is the Sound Recognition option in the Accessibility Settings. The new feature is meant to detect various types of sounds that people might miss out on due to hearing issues or simply when they aren’t paying attention.

To name a few, this iOS 14 feature can recognize sounds like running water, doorbell, cats, dogs, someone shouting, car horns, alarms, and sounds of some household appliances.

Now, while testing the sound recognition feature, I almost forgot that it’s not enabled by default on iOS 14 and ended up wasting some water (I compensated by saving water somewhere else).

Since Sound Recognition is an accessibility feature, probably that’s the reason it’s disabled by default as a lesser number of people will use it. But it does work when active. Anyway, let’s talk about how you can kick start the feature.

How to turn on ‘water running’ notifications on iOS 14?

As I just mentioned, the Sound Recognition feature is buried deep inside the Settings app. And getting it to work can be tedious if you haven’t downloaded the iOS 14 Developer Beta.

You can read our detailed post on how to get the iOS 14 beta build on your supported iPhone. Once you’re done, follow the steps mentioned below.

1. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility.
   
2. Scroll down and tap on Sound Recognition.
   
3. Tap on the toggle button to enable the Sound Recognition feature.
   
4. Tap on the Sounds option that appears next.
   
5. On the next screen, you can select what type of sounds you want your iPhone to recognize. In this case, it’s the Water Running and Door Knock toggle buttons.
   

Once you’re done, you’ll start receiving notifications for different sounds in some time.

Now, as far as the experience is concerned, I think the Sound Recognition feature is still in the budding stage. There were many times when it confused some other sound to that of water and displayed the water running notification.

In order to decipher the sounds, the processing is done on the device itself, and so you don’t need an internet connection all the time. Also, given the error rate, you shouldn’t completely rely on Sound Recognition, especially when there is an emergency.

Overall, it’s a cool addition to iOS 14, and these days when we have a lot of spare time, it would be fun to play around with it for a while.

Apart from this, iOS 14 also lets you double-tap on the back of your iPhone to turn on Google Assistant. Also, the option to change video resolution and frame rate have been added to the Camera app.