Hear what matters.
The sounds that matter, when they matter.
A sound awareness app for deaf and hard of hearing users. Learns your specific sounds, understands where you are, and scales alerts to the moment.
Your audio never leaves your phone.
Built at RIT with NTID.
Works fully offline, even in airplane mode.
Home to NTID, one of the largest deaf and hard of hearing student communities in the world.
All audio processing runs on your device. Nothing uploads. Not ever.
Designed and tested with deaf and hard of hearing users from day one.
Sound detection apps
treat every sound the same.
A doorbell and a fire alarm get the same generic buzz. Existing apps do not know where you are. They do not learn your specific sounds. They cannot tell the difference between a microwave finishing and someone calling your name.
SoundSense was built to fix that. Not with a louder alert. With a smarter one.
Four things
that make the difference.
Always listening
Continuous on-device sound monitoring that runs in the background without destroying your battery. Layered detection wakes the classifier only when something interesting happens.
Learns your sounds
Train the app on your specific doorbell, your specific smoke detector, your specific microwave. Three short samples and it recognizes that exact sound from then on.
Alerts that match the moment
A fire alarm at home at 3 AM is a full-screen takeover. A microwave beep is a gentle haptic. Urgency scales to the sound, the time, the place, and what you taught the app to care about.
Private by design
Everything runs on your device. Your phone listens, classifies, and discards. No audio is ever recorded to storage, uploaded to a server, or seen by anyone else. Airplane mode does not break it.
SoundSense knows where you are
and what's normal there.
A car horn downtown is routine. A car horn in the forest is an emergency signal. Context changes everything, and SoundSense is the first app that treats it that way.
Smoke alarm goes off in the kitchen.
Doorbell rings while you're asleep.
Car horn on a busy street.
Built with the community,
not for it in the abstract.
SoundSense is being built at the Rochester Institute of Technology, home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Every design decision defers to the people who will actually use this app.
If that is you, you'll find a product that treats sound awareness as essential infrastructure, not a novelty.
Your audio never leaves
your device.
On-device processing
Sound classification happens locally, using a model that ships bundled with the app. No cloud inference, no server round-trips, no internet needed.
No audio storage
Your phone listens, classifies the sound, and discards the audio. Nothing is saved to disk. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing is seen by anyone at SoundSense.
You control what syncs
Only the names and settings of your sounds sync to the cloud for backup. Never the audio. Never the fingerprints. You can turn off sync entirely.
Verify it yourself.
Don't just take our word for it. Put your phone in airplane mode. SoundSense keeps working. Everything that matters runs on your device, and the app is transparent about every permission it uses.
I'm Aaron, a grad student at RIT, where NTID has shaped how I think about accessibility every day since I got here.
SoundSense exists because the apps that already do this job treat every sound the same, and the people who depend on them deserve better. The app is built with the deaf and hard of hearing community, it works on your device without uploading a single second of audio, and it will always be honest about what it can and cannot do.
Thanks for taking a look.
SoundSense is dedicated to the memory of Jeff Gordon.
Hear what matters.
Starting today.Free to download. Free to use. No account required to start.