01 / nightear / one real night / 92 sounds / on the phone
What your phone hears while you sleep.
Nightear is an Android app that listens through the night, works out what each sound was, and tells you how you slept. It runs on the phone, and a few taps correct what it got wrong. Scroll to follow one sound from the pillow to its label.
Your nights stay on your phone.
Try it on Android ↓No audio plays on this page. The spectrograms are real sounds from my nights, and the labels are what the app recorded.
02 / private by default
By default, nothing leaves your phone.
A microphone by your bed all night is a lot to ask, so the whole app is built to work without a server. Out of the box, every recording, every model and every result stays on your phone, and nothing is shared with us.
Your phone
Recordings
Saved to the app's private storage, and left out of phone backups.
The models
Built into the app. Every sound is named on the phone, not on a server.
Your score
Worked out on the phone, from your own nights.
Your answers
What you tap each morning trains a small model that also stays there.
The cloud
Off
Sharing is off until you turn it on yourself.
- No account
- No ads
- No analytics
- No server needed
The one exception is yours to make.
To improve the models, testers can choose to share every sound clip, including talking. It is a separate switch, off by default, and it asks first. Those clips can hold real conversations, so check with anyone who sleeps in the room. Whole nights stay on the phone. Shared clips use an anonymous ID, with a button to delete them. Otherwise, something leaves your phone only if you send it yourself, like exporting a clip or a report.
03 / one night
A real night, minute by minute.
Every bar is a minute of my night: how far the room rose over its own background, in the colour of the sound that filled it. I slept 6h 16m and snored for 16% of it, so the score is 69.
Nights and naps are scored apart.
9:23 am
- Snoring
- Coughs
- Breathing
- Someone else
- Movement
- Vehicles
- Noise
- Awake
- Sounds heard
- 92
- Snoring
- 1h 00m
- Wake-ups
- 3
- Latest
- +13 dB
Latest is how far the last sound rose over the room’s background.
THIS MORNING
6h 16m
2:42 am → 9:23 am
- Duration61
- Breathing55
- Continuity63
- Efficiency100
- Falling asleep100
- Quiet room76
04 / why 69
Every number explains itself.
A sleep score you can’t question is just a mood. In the app, every number has an “i” that shows how it was worked out and where your night falls. Pick a part.
Score for this night
Duration
How long you actually slept, against the 7 to 9 hours adults need. It counts most.
Time asleepPoints
- 4 h or less0
- 5 h25
- 6 h50
- You · 6h 16m61
- 7 h90
- 7½–9 h100
- 10 h85
- 12 h or more60
Points change gradually between the rows.
05 / how it learns
It asks very little, and learns from your answers.
We’re still measuring how much those answers help one person over time.
- 1Each morning it asks about a few sounds, ten at first and four after a week: the ones it was least sure of, one of each kind before a second of any.
- 2One tap names the main sound. For a long clip it plays the 8 seconds most like its guess, and learns only from those, so a passing car doesn't get taught as snoring.
- 3Answers train a small model on the phone, kept per room, so vehicles heard by one bed aren't assumed at another. You can describe a room in plain words too.
- 4It also asks how you feel. Over weeks that moves your sleep target, within limits: feeling fine on short sleep is weak evidence, so it never goes below 7 hours. Naps are left out of this, because the question is about the night.
- 5Possible breathing pauses are judged over several nights, never one, and only ever as something worth mentioning to a doctor.
06 / is it right
31 of 33 snores found, with one false alarm.
That is a blind test on 102 labelled clips from my own nights. With YAMNet alone it found 20. Adding a second model, EfficientAT, made the difference. It is one person’s bedroom, so it is a start, not proof. Across every kind of sound, only 53% of those clips were labelled correctly, which is why the app asks and learns.
The harder test is someone it hasn’t heard. Version 1.3 adds a model trained on testers’ labels. On 264 labelled clips from 2 testers, each left out of training in turn, snores caught rose from 67% to 82%, with about 3% false alarms. That’s still a small test. Nightear isn’t a medical device, and sleep times are estimates from sound and phone use.
07 / coming soon
More bedrooms than mine.
People are testing it now, and those who opt in share sound clips that help the models hear more rooms. A retrained model ships only if it helps a tester it was never trained on.
- Version 1.4
- Connect a watch or ring to see its sleep beside Nightear’s.
- Version 2.0
- Nightear on iPhone.
08 / try it
Test it in your bedroom.
Nightear is an early test version, and every bedroom teaches it something mine can’t. It needs an Android phone on Android 8 or newer, which covers most phones from the last few years. There is no iPhone version yet. Version 1.3 lets you tag what’s different before bed, compare those nights, and see how fast you breathe while snoring.
- 1Open the download on your phone. Android will warn you because it isn't from the Play Store, so allow the install if you're happy to.
- 2Tap Start when you go to bed, and leave the phone plugged in near you.
- 3In the morning, answer the few sounds it asks about, then tell me what it got right and wrong.
It doesn’t update itself, so download it again for a new version. Installing over the old one keeps your nights. Sharing stays off unless you turn it on, and Nightear isn’t a medical device.