Voice stop: recording tips
How well voice stop works is mostly decided in the thirty seconds you spend recording your word. The app compares what it hears against your own recordings and nothing else, so if you record calmly and then speak while straining, it can miss you — at exactly the moment you need it.
First, pick the right method
Settings → Far from device → Stop method.
- Loud voice stops the clock on any sound loud enough. Nothing to record. Good in a quiet room, on your own. In a gym with music, dropped weights or other people, it will stop on things that are not you.
- Say your word listens for one word you recorded. It takes a minute to set up and holds up far better in a noisy room, because a barbell hitting the floor does not sound like your word.
Record the way you will actually sound
This is the single thing that matters most, and it is easy to get wrong.
Your voice at the end of a hard set is not your normal voice. It comes out short and clipped, pitched higher because your throat is tight, with breath wrapped around it. The app matches on the shape of the sound, and those are different shapes. A word recorded sitting calmly on the sofa may not match the same word gasped at the end of a dead hang.
So:
- Get out of breath first. Do the thing you are going to time — hold the plank, hang off the bar — until it is genuinely hard, then record straight away without letting your breathing settle.
- Record all three in that state. Do not recover between them.
- Make the three different on purpose. One at the very end of a hold, one mid-effort, one closer to normal. The app checks your word against each recording and takes the best match, so variety widens what it will accept rather than watering it down.
If you would rather not exhaust yourself just to set it up: hold your breath for twenty seconds, or brace hard against a wall, and force the word out at the end of an exhale. It is not as good as the real thing, but it beats a relaxed recording.
You may see a warning that one recording sounds like a different word. On a deliberately varied set that is expected. It is only ever a warning — the recording is still kept, and a strained repeat is exactly what you want in there.
Choosing a word
- One short word. Two syllables is plenty.
- Any language. The app does not know what language you are speaking — it never looks the word up, it only compares sounds. Thai, Chinese, anything at all works equally well. Made-up words work too.
- Not a grunt. Pick something that does not sound like the noises you already make while lifting, or you will stop the clock by accident.
- Something you can still say when you are wrecked. A word that needs careful articulation is the wrong word.
Test it before you rely on it
The setup screen has a Test button. Tap it, say your word, and it tells you whether that would have stopped the clock. Test it in the state and the place you will use it — out of breath, in the actual room, with the phone where you actually leave it. A test that passes on the sofa proves very little.
If it does not hear you
Work down this list in order:
- Re-record, properly out of breath. This fixes it far more often than any setting does. Use Re-record all and read the section above again.
- Move Sensitivity towards Lenient. It accepts a looser match.
- Turn up Mic boost if the phone is across the room. It makes a distant voice reach the app.
- Check what is between you and the phone. A phone face-down on a mat, in a pocket, or under a towel hears very little.
If it stops when it should not
- On Loud voice, in a noisy place: switch to Say your word. No sensitivity setting can tell a dropped dumbbell from a shout, because both are just loud.
- Move Sensitivity towards Strict. It demands a closer match, or a louder sound.
- Turn Mic boost down. Boost amplifies the room as well as you. If the input meter says the sound is distorting, it is turned up too far — and a distorted word matches worse, not better.
- Change your word if it sounds like something you say or grunt often.
The listening icon
While the stopwatch runs, a small head-with-soundwaves icon sits next to the Stop button. That is the app telling you the truth about the microphone:
- Normal — it is listening, and your word will stop it.
- Dimmed and crossed out — it is not listening. Either you have not recorded a word yet, or microphone permission was refused or revoked, or you are on the setup screen recording, which borrows the microphone for as long as you are there.
- No icon — voice stop is switched off in Settings.
Things that look like faults but are not
- The microphone does not open during the countdown. It opens when the clock actually starts, so the countdown beeps cannot stop the run before it begins.
- The app speaking the elapsed time does not stop the clock. It knows its own voice is not yours.
- Headphones do not become the microphone. With a Bluetooth headset connected, spoken read-outs play through it, but the app keeps listening on the phone's own microphone — which is what you want when the phone is the thing across the room.
- Your recordings do not survive a reinstall or a new phone. The voice data is deliberately excluded from backups and device transfers, so it never leaves the device by any route. Record your word again on the new one.
What is actually stored
No audio, ever. The app keeps a mathematical fingerprint of the three captures — a summary of the sound's shape — which cannot be turned back into audio or speech. It stays on your device, and Re-record all replaces it. Everything is matched on the device itself; the app has no network access at all. See the privacy policy for Android or iOS.
Still stuck?
Tell me what happened and what you had tried: megastopwatch@chonla.com