I consider myself quite an advanced iOS user and have always been extremely sceptical of the stories of smart speakers randomly playing music during the night without any prompting or sound going on in the house for example, but last night my phone did something that has completely baffled me.
I'm using an iPhone 16E running iOS 26.2. I went to bed around 11PM last night and put my phone on the wireless charger next to my bed as usual. Around 1AM, I was woken up by my phone ranting away to itself almost on full volume. From what I remember hearing in my half asleep state, this is what I heard:
“Client date, client time, client language, client screen reader on, client unit, missing required fields”.
This carried on in a loop for at least a minute while I tried to figure out what was going on. VoiceOver was talking normally during this time, the phone was functional and I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, but this loop was just going continuously. In the end, because both my wife and I were less than impressed and because I didn't want it to wake up our baby in the next room, the quickest and easiest way I could think to shut it up was to power the phone off completely, and I just left it powered off for the night. When I powered the phone back on again this morning, everything is absolutely fine, as though nothing has happened.
An odd thing here is that loop was spoken using the Samantha voice which I never use, is not my system default and I can't think of any apps I have on my phone that use that voice. The other thing that's odd is that these were clearly user agent details that an app would be receiving, and I can't think why they would be spoken out like that even if there was some kind of error, especially in a completely different voice to anything else.
My sleep focus was enabled, so all notifications apart from a couple of specific contacts were being silenced at the time.
Anyone have any idea what the hell might have gone on here? It's made me slightly nervous for tonight now! And before you ask, I did double check with my wife this morning and it did actually happen, it wasn't a crazy dream!
Any thoughts or ideas definitely welcome on this one.
Comments
That’s very strange
But very strange. I think I may have heard of something like this one other time. I don’t remember how somebody fixed it though. Just out of curiosity, do you turn off your speech normally at night and then it just came back on? I’ve never seen anything like this, but I think I may have heard about something like this maybe one other time on this website. So that I don’t remember exactly how somebody fixed it though. What voice do you normally use on your phone?
it sounds like it maybe was "speak screen" that somehow got acti
hey there.
it's just a guess, as you said you don't use samantha.
i turned off the "speak screen" feature years ago as i would sometimes accidently activate it and could not get rid of the little control panel on the screen.
but it sounds like your phone was locked and maybe springboard crashed and kicked off speak screen.
maybe there is a crash log on your phone still that has some details of that
This is one of the reasons I started turning off my speech at ni
Stuff like this is why I turn off my speech at night. Although I don’t know if that would matter because if your phone did crash, it may trigger speech back on anyway. Hopefully you’ll get this resolved pretty soon. It seems really weird.
Possibly a diagnostic
On one hand, it sounds like a diagnostic test was being run on your device. On the other hand, I have no idea why this would be happening…
Think I’ve found the answer
Thanks for all the comments. It happened again the night after I posted this, and after some very careful investigation and a chat with the developers of this particular app, we’re almost certain this was an error with an app I'm currently beta testing.
Just to answer a couple of the questions that have come up, I do leave VoiceOver and the speech enabled at night and don't have a problem with this most of the time, but it wouldn't have made a difference on this occasion because it was not spoken through VoiceOver. Even with VO off completely, this would've still been spoken. I found it unlikely that it was related to the Speak Screen feature as I have never enabled that, and my phone was locked and on charge at the time, so it couldn't have been accidentally enabled. Nothing is impossible with tech I suppose, but it was unlikely.
It seemed to be related to a technical issue on this particular app's side which then caused an error to be sent back to the phone and voiced out loud, but according to the developers it should be resolved now. They're also looking into why it was triggering and queering data at random times like that.
A moot point, but still thought I would ask…
Did you catch the precise time this was happening? I am only asking, cause I am wondering if they had some kind of a schedule for these types of diagnostic/logs to be displayed/announced?
I was just curious.
Oh wow, it was specific to one particular app? Interesting.
Oh wow, that’s interesting. That was the one specific app. Well, I’m glad you got that figured out. Hopefully that won’t be happening again for you. That would’ve scared me if my phone woke me up in the middle of the night like that. Just out of curiosity, what voice do you normally use?
Re Brian and Singer Girl
I didn't catch the exact time unfortunately. I know it was roughly 1AM on the first occasion and maybe around 12.10AM on the second, but can't be sure exactly. If it happens again (which they've assured me it shouldn't do), I'll try my best to provide the exact time to them so they can check their logs if needed. Another tester has reported a similar experience, although theirs was during the day, so I think we can be pretty certain now what the problem was.
As for the question of which voice I use, I mainly use the Serena voice, and sometimes use the British Siri 3 voice depending what I'm listening to.
Speculative curiosity
Would this be the application infamously known as Alli? I boughed out of the beta some time ago based on its randomness, could just be an artificial intelligence phenomenon glad you figured it out
Far fetched explanation attempt
The first application that I made after going blind and realizing that I could still code was a game, it had 3D graphics, which I have a background in, and I didn't have many opportunities to test it with the sighted, so what I did was turn the main view of the game where the graphics were displayed into an accessibility direct touch area, and then made every touch cast a ray from the perspective of the player into the game world to announce information about the closest object intersected by the ray whenever VoiceOver was enabled. The idea was allowing me to independently gage more or less what the visible scene would look like to a sighted player under the same conditions, and in situations involving fast-paced action I would just slow everything down significantly. At one point I ever considered making the game test itself by automating player actions in response to the environment, but ended up abandoning the project altogether since I had already proven myself that blindness was not a real problem and I had no one to actually make sounds for the game so publishing to the App Store was also out of question.
My guess is that, in the unlikely event that the developers of the app in question are also blind, they might have just decided to make the system announce information for debugging purposes.
There’s a great Voice choices and I’m glad you got this figured
Those are great Voice choices. I’m glad you’ve seemed to have gotten your issue resolved. Hopefully that won’t be happening again.
Not Ally
It wasn't Ally, it was a navigation app called Navis. I don't want to say too much about it currently as it's extremely early days for them at the moment (some elements of it are still in alpha stage), but it's shaping up to be a very interesting app. They're aware of what caused it and have apparently resolved it in a TestFlight build that was released yesterday.
I'd guess @João Santos’ explanation is probably correct.