Why might you want your phone to listen to your environment?

Google has come out with a new accessibility feature that might actually make you want to have your smartphone listening in on you and your surroundings. Designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, the new Sound Notifications for Android and Wear OS devices can, when enabled, tell you if it hears important sounds in your vicinity.

The system was built off of work from Google’s pre-existing Live Transcribe feature, which creates real-time speech-to-text transcriptions of what the people around the user say. Sound Notifications was created using machine learning technology and uses a smartphone’s built-in microphone to listen to its surroundings and identify certain sounds like a beeping appliance or running water. It then notifies the user by push notification, vibration or flashing the camera light.

To allay privacy concerns, Sound Notifications operates offline only and does not connect to the Internet or transmit data. Furthermore, it is not turned on by default — users must go into their device’s accessibility settings in order to activate it. Some Android device users may first need to download Live Transcribe and Sound Notifications from the Google Play Store.