Read Notes Aloud: your Apple Watch speaks the set's cue
A workout plan in slotho can carry notes. One for the exercise, and one for each set: bar position, tempo, a reminder to stop a rep short. They have been on your wrist since 2025, ready at exactly the moment you need them — with your hands on the bar.
In 26.3 the watch can say them out loud. The switch is called Read Notes Aloud.
What it says, and when
The note is spoken when the set changes. Two rules decide what comes out:
- When the exercise changes, the exercise’s own note is read first, then the set’s cue.
- Within an exercise, only the set’s cue is read. Repeating “elbows tucked” before every set of the same movement is noise, so it does not happen.
- Nothing to say, nothing spoken. A set with no note is silent.
Interval sets say nothing at all. During an interval the screen shows the next step rather than the notes, and the speech follows the screen.
Where the sound goes
Through the watch’s own speaker, or through whatever headphones the watch is connected to. Your music is lowered while it talks and comes back afterwards, rather than being stopped.
That behaviour is a decision, not a default. The audio session is .playback with .spokenAudio and .duckOthers. The obvious alternative — the long-form audio policy — was measured on a physical watch and rejected: it routes to headphones exclusively and cannot duck, so it would have silenced the speaker and stopped your music instead of ducking it.
The language of the note, not the language of the phone
A trainer who writes in Portuguese should be read in Portuguese, even on an English watch.
The note’s language is detected on the watch, then matched against the voices that are actually installed. The device’s own region wins where it can — a Brazilian device gets the Brazilian variant — and otherwise the first installed variant of that language is used. If nothing is installed for it, the system’s default voice reads it rather than the watch staying silent.
What we checked on a real watch first
Speech on watchOS has a reputation: that it plays only through AirPods, and that it goes quiet after a while. Both were worth taking seriously, so the feature started as a spike on a physical watch rather than in the simulator — and it is the reason the shipped version behaves.
The built-in speaker works, so you do not need headphones for this. The second half of the reputation is real and is worked around: a synthesiser that has been told to stop speaking is not reliable afterwards — its next request can do nothing at all, with no callback. slotho therefore builds a fresh synthesiser after every stop, so a cue that gets interrupted by the next set change is followed by one that still speaks.
Turning it on
On the watch: Settings, under Workout, Read Notes Aloud.
It is off until you turn it on, and it is free — there is no Pro gate on the switch. Its footer in the app says the whole of it:
Speaks the set’s note through the watch speaker or your headphones when the set changes, lowering your music while it talks. A note in another language is read in that language.
What it is not
This is not an accessibility feature. VoiceOver already reads the note out — it is a labelled piece of text on the screen like any other. Read Notes Aloud is a hands-free convenience for people who can see the watch perfectly well and simply cannot look at it right now.
More
- Writing the notes: open a workout day in Log → Workout Plans, add a note to the exercise and to any set.
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- slotho is made by red8.io.