slotho

← All news

Read Notes Aloud: your Apple Watch speaks the set's cue

slotho share card — the sloth app icon beside the slotho wordmark and the line "Your workout plans just found their voice", on a near-black background

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.

slotho Read Notes Aloud. Headline: You write the cue once, in the plan. Caption: a note for the exercise, and a note for each set, read to you at the set that needs them. An iPhone screenshot of a workout plan, Day 1: Exercise 1 carries the note “Bar on the traps, not the neck. Brace, then stand up.”, and a set of 8 reps at 60 kg carries the cue “Go slow”.

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 obvious alternative was tried on a real watch and rejected: it plays only through headphones and cannot lower your music, so it would have silenced the speaker and stopped your music instead.

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.

slotho Read Notes Aloud. Headline: Write it in Portuguese. Hear it in Portuguese. Caption: the language is detected from the note itself and matched to a voice your watch already has; your watch stays in English. An iPhone screenshot of the same plan with a second exercise noted in Portuguese, “Mantenha a barra nos ombros. Suba com o tronco firme.”, and the set cue “Sem pressa”.

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 we tried the feature on a real watch before building it — and that is why the version you get behaves.

The built-in speaker works, so you do not need headphones for this. The second half of the reputation is real, and slotho works around it: once the watch’s voice has been cut off, the next thing it is asked to say can simply never come out. So slotho starts the voice afresh every time one is cut off, and a cue 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.

slotho Read Notes Aloud. Headline: One switch, on the watch. And it is free. Caption: Watch Settings, under Workout; it stays quiet until you turn it on. An Apple Watch screenshot of three switches: Long Timer Haptics off, Sloth Pacing off, and Read Notes Aloud on in green.

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.
  • Support · FAQ · All releases
  • slotho is made by red8.io.