How LoudNow works

A walkthrough, screen by screen

The one idea worth understanding

Most filtering apps work on words alone. LoudNow does not, and this is the thing to grasp before anything else: every phrase belongs to one sender.

A sender is a person, an app, or a group chat. A phrase is a word or a few words. The phrase only ever fires for the sender it belongs to. So “help” from your daughter can wake the house at three in the morning, while the same word in a news headline, a colleague’s message or a group you never added stays silent — without you having to think about it, and without a list of exceptions to maintain.

This is why the app asks for a sender first and phrases second, and why phrases live inside a sender rather than in a list of their own. If you find yourself wanting the same phrase for two people, add it to both; each one keeps its own settings.

Setting it up

First run is six screens and takes about a minute. Every step after the first can be skipped and done later — a phone that alerts with the defaults is better than one abandoned halfway through being configured.

1. What it does

   A short explanation of the idea: your people, their words, spoken aloud. Nothing to fill in. Android will also ask whether LoudNow may post notifications; it needs this to show the alert on your screen.

2. Notification access

   The permission everything depends on. LoudNow opens Android’s Notification access list, you find LoudNow, switch it on and come back. The screen notices by itself and turns green — there is nothing to confirm.

   Android asks you to confirm a fairly alarming warning here, about the app being able to read all your notifications. That warning is accurate and it is the same for every app of this kind: there is no narrower permission to ask for. What LoudNow then does with that access is the subject of what leaves your phone, below.

   If the switch is greyed out, Android has restricted the app because it was installed from outside the Play Store. Open App info, then the three-dot menu, then Allow restricted settings.

3. Who can make LoudNow loud

   Add your first sender. Add person either picks someone from your contacts — which stores their number as well as their name, so it still matches when the display name differs — or takes a name you type. Add app lists the apps on your phone.

   A typed name has to match exactly how the messaging app shows it, letter for letter, though capitals do not matter. This is deliberate: loose matching would make “Mom” fire for “Tom”. Someone who is not in your contacts shows up as a raw number, so type the number instead and LoudNow will match it however it is written.

   An app sender is different from a person: every notification it posts counts, because a glucose monitor or an alarm panel has no sender name to check.

4. Now their words

   Type a phrase for that sender. A phrase can be several words — “help me” counts as one phrase and only fires when both words appear together, in that order.

   By default a phrase matches whole words only, so “help” will not fire on “helpful”. There is a switch to match inside words when you want the broader net.

   One phrase is enough to start. The free plan includes two, each with its own alarm sound; Pro lifts the limit.

5. How each one should sound

   Every phrase can have its own settings, or follow your default. This is the step most people skip, and skipping it is fine — it exists because some words deserve more discretion than others. “Margin call” can read the whole message out loud; “test results” probably should not, if the phone is on a desk in an open office.

   The same screen is where a phrase is limited to certain days and hours, if it should only speak up during work, or only overnight.

6. Hear it once

   A preview of exactly what your phone will say, built from the sender and phrase you just added, and a button to play it. This is also where LoudNow checks whether Android’s battery optimisation is switched off for it, and — on Samsung, Xiaomi and similar — tells you the extra vendor-specific setting that otherwise puts the app to sleep.

   Do play the test. It is the only moment where you find out that your phone has no text-to-speech voice installed, or that the alarm volume is at zero.

The three tabs

Home

Deliberately close to empty. At the top, whether LoudNow is watching, when it last saw any notification at all, and when it last checked itself — with a switch to pause everything without uninstalling. Below that, “What did I miss?”, a button to play a test alert, and one thing worth knowing about the app, which changes on the hour.

If Home is boring, LoudNow is working. Anything wrong appears here first, in plain words, with the button that fixes it.

Senders

The list of everyone and everything allowed to reach you, each showing how it was added and when LoudNow last recognised something from it. That last part matters more than it looks: not recognised yet, days after someone has messaged you, is how you discover a name was typed wrongly.

Tap a sender to open their phrases. That screen is theirs alone — add a phrase by typing it, or take one from the ready-made packs, and tap any phrase to change what its alert does — and, with Pro, when it may speak, what it says and which sound it makes.

Settings

Alarm volume and whether each unanswered repeat gets louder. The ways to stop an alert. The six switches that make up your default for what an alert does. The alert sound — LoudNow’s own tone, or, with Pro, any alarm already on your phone. The voice. Light or dark. How to run a check by hand, how to clear your history, and your plan.

What happens when a message arrives

All of this happens on your phone, in the moment the notification is posted, and takes a fraction of a second.

1. Android hands over the notification

   Because you granted notification access, LoudNow is shown every notification as it is posted. It reads the title, the text, the expanded text, the ticker and — for messaging apps — the individual messages in the conversation, each with its own author.

2. What it can and cannot see

   Android’s own hide sensitive content on the lock screen changes nothing here: that only affects what the lock screen draws, and the full text still reaches LoudNow.

   A messaging app’s own preview setting is a different matter. If WhatsApp is set not to put the message text in its notification, those words never leave WhatsApp — LoudNow cannot match what it was never given, and no app of this kind could. If you rely on phrases in an app, leave its previews on.

3. It works out who sent it

   For an app sender, the app is the sender and that is the end of it. For a person, LoudNow compares the notification’s author against the name you stored, and against the phone number if it has one, so a number written as +31 6 1234 5678 still matches one you typed as 0612345678.

   If the sender is not one of yours, LoudNow stops here: nothing is spoken, and nothing is stored. The one exception is the second opinion, if you have switched it on — it looks at exactly these notifications, and at most leaves a quiet notice for later.

4. It looks for that sender’s phrases

   Only phrases belonging to that sender are considered. In a group conversation each message is judged on its own author, so a phrase from the right person in the wrong group still fires, and the wrong person in the right group does not. If you added the group itself as a sender, its phrases apply to whoever wrote — that is the point of adding it — and the alert names the author and the group together. A group is matched on its whole name exactly as the chat shows it, never on a word inside it, so a group called “Team” does not quietly take in “Site team” as well.

   When the app sends a whole conversation at once, the newest message is the one the alert is about.

5. It decides whether to speak now

   If the phrase is limited to certain hours and this is outside them, it stays silent — but the match is still recorded, so you find it later in “What did I miss?”. If the same message has just been announced seconds ago, the repeat is ignored; messaging apps post the same notification several times for one message. A second, genuinely new message is always treated as new, even if it says exactly the same thing.

6. Then it speaks

   The alert tone plays first, then the announcement, on the alarm channel.

A second opinion

Everything above is yours: your senders, your phrases, your alarm. This is the one part that is not, which is why it is kept deliberately small and is switched off until you ask for it.

LoudNow can run a small AI model, on your phone, over the notifications it was about to ignore — the ones from people who are not on your sender list and which matched none of your phrases. If one of them reads like an emergency, it posts a quiet notice on a notification channel of its own, so you can look when you get a moment.

What it does not do matters more than what it does:

• It never sets off the alarm. Only your phrases do that. The notice is an ordinary notification at ordinary importance; it does not take over the screen and it does not push through Do Not Disturb.
• It never overrules you. It only ever sees what LoudNow had already decided to stay silent about, so it cannot change, delay or suppress an alert you set up.
• It is off until you switch it on, in Settings. Switching it off again unloads it from memory rather than merely ignoring it.
• It has its own channel, so you can silence it from the notification settings without touching anything you built.

It is a guess, and it is often wrong. It is built on a straightforward trade: a false alarm costs you a glance, while a missed one can cost a great deal more — so it errs towards mentioning things rather than staying quiet. If that is not a trade you want, leave it off; nothing else in the app depends on it.

Nothing is sent anywhere. The model runs on this phone, the message is forgotten as soon as it has been read, and there is no server for it to be sent to.

When a phrase may speak

Tapping a phrase, under its sender, opens what it can be given of its own. On Free that is what its alert does; with Pro it is also when it may speak, what it says and the sound it makes. This page has mentioned hours twice already without saying where they come from, so: here.

A phrase is set to Always unless you change it. Certain times asks for two things — which days, and between which times, to the minute.

• Work, without the evenings. Mon–Fri, 08:30–17:30. A P1 wakes the room during the day and waits until morning at the weekend.
• Only at night. Every day, 22:00–07:00. A window that ends before it starts simply runs over midnight; it belongs to the day it starts, so Friday’s night window covers Friday evening into Saturday morning.
• Whole days. Set the two times the same and the phrase is live all day, on the days you picked.

Outside its hours the phrase does not make a sound — and it is still recorded. It appears in “What did I miss?” marked as not spoken, which is the point of keeping it: the phone stayed quiet exactly as you asked, and you still get to see what arrived while it did.

Hours belong to the phrase, not to the sender. The same person can have one word that may wake you at three in the morning and another that waits until breakfast.

What an alert does

Six things, each with its own switch, set as a default in Settings and overridable for any single phrase:

• The alarm tone — four seconds, before anything is said.
• Who it is from — “from Ella on WhatsApp”.
• The phrase — the words that matched.
• The message — the message itself, read out. Off by default, because anyone nearby hears it.
• Vibration — with every repeat.
• The camera light — blinking with every repeat, slowly enough to be safe for light-sensitive people.

With the default settings, a message from Ella containing “help me” produces:

Switch the spoken parts off entirely and the alarm sounds without a word, which is the most discreet setting that still wakes you. You can also write your own sentence for a phrase, using {sender}, {app}, {phrase} and {message} — “Check your trading app” for a margin call, say.

Whatever is spoken, the notification LoudNow puts on your screen always shows the full message. The switches govern what the room hears, not what you can read.

The alert repeats every 15 seconds until you stop it, and gives up after 30 minutes. With repeat louder on, each unanswered repeat rises towards full alarm volume, and your own volume is put back afterwards.

Which modes it actually gets through

LoudNow speaks on the alarm channel, so it behaves like your morning alarm rather than like a notification. That is not the same as getting through everything:

• Ring, vibrate and silent — it sounds. Android keeps the alarm channel audible in all three.
• Do Not Disturb, Bedtime, Sleep and driving modes — it sounds as long as alarms are allowed, which is the Android default and what those modes normally leave switched on.
• Do Not Disturb set to total silence — it does not. If you have told Android to silence alarms as well, LoudNow is an alarm and goes with them. The fix costs almost none of the quiet: allow alarms in Do Not Disturb’s exceptions, or use ordinary Do Not Disturb instead of total silence, and a phrase comes through while everything else stays as silent as before. LoudNow says so on its home screen when it finds itself in this state — it cannot lift Do Not Disturb for you, and an app that could would not be one to trust.
• Alarm volume at zero — it does not. The vibration and the camera light still fire, and the alert still appears on your screen and in “What did I miss?”. LoudNow warns you when it finds the alarm volume down.
• Battery saver and the aggressive power modes on some phones can stop LoudNow running at all, which is what the last setup screen is about.

So it is not a way of overriding the phone. It is an alarm, and it obeys the one rule you set for alarms.

Stopping one

Two of these work without unlocking, looking at the screen, or finding the phone:

• Shake the phone three times.
• Turn it face down for a second. A phone that was already face down keeps sounding — otherwise an alert could be silenced by a phone lying on a table.
• Press a volume key, tap Stop on the alert screen or on the notification, swipe the notification away, or open LoudNow.

“What did I miss?”

Every alert LoudNow raised, newest first, grouped by day, over the last seven days — with three views: since you last looked, the last 24 hours, and the full week. Each entry shows the phrase that matched, the app and time, and the message.

Phrases that matched outside their active hours appear here too, marked as not spoken. That is the point of keeping them: the phone stayed quiet as you asked, and you still get to see what happened.

Only matches are kept. Every other notification your phone receives is examined and forgotten in the same instant, and nothing about it is written down.

Knowing it still works

An app like this fails silently. If Android kills it, or notification access is switched off, nothing happens — and nothing happening is exactly what it looks like when everything is fine. So LoudNow checks on itself:

• Every 15 minutes it confirms it can still see your notifications, and says so at once if it cannot.
• Once a day it posts a short “still watching” note, so you have seen proof without opening anything.
• If a sender goes completely quiet for a day, it says so and points at that app’s own notification settings — an app can be switched off inside itself while Android still lists it as allowed. Gmail is the usual culprit.
• It runs a foreground service and asks to be left out of battery optimisation, which is what keeps it alive when the phone is idle.

Some manufacturers — Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus, Oppo and to a lesser degree Samsung — close background apps aggressively, whatever Android says. The last setup screen names the setting for your phone, and it is worth doing. This is the single biggest cause of “it stopped working” in every app of this kind.

What leaves your phone

Nothing. There is no account, no sign-in and no server. Your senders, your phrases and your alert history are stored on the phone and nowhere else, and are excluded from Android backups. Notifications are matched in memory as they arrive; the ones that do not match are never written down at all.

The second opinion changes none of that: its model is part of the app rather than something it calls out to, it reads in memory like everything else, and it keeps nothing. LoudNow also speaks using the text-to-speech voice already installed on your phone, so nothing is sent away to be read aloud either. You can clear your alert history at any time from Settings, and the last seven days delete themselves regardless.

The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Still have a question? The help chat answers most of them, or write to support@loudnow.app. Every feature, explained