SoundSleep
Most sleep sound apps do one thing: they watch how loud the room is, and when it crosses a line they save a clip. That is easy to build and it produces a chart that looks convincing. It also cannot tell you the one thing you actually want to know, which is what made the noise.
A snore and a sentence can hit the same peak level. So can a fan, a passing truck, and a dog two doors down. If loudness is your only instrument, all four are the same event.
Two questions, not one
SoundSleep splits the problem in half. First a level gate asks whether anything happened at all, measured against the room's own noise floor rather than a fixed threshold, because a quiet bedroom and a city apartment do not share a baseline. Then, and only then, a sound classifier running entirely on your phone asks what it was.
That second step is the one that matters. It is what separates snoring from heavy breathing, a cough from a sentence, and you from your room. On iPhone it uses Apple's built-in sound analysis; on Android it uses YAMNet. Neither sends a single byte anywhere.
Why a snore is not one event
Snoring is not a noise, it is a rhythm. A single snore lasts a second or two, and there may be four hundred of them in a night. Listing four hundred rows is technically accurate and completely useless.
So consecutive snores with no real silence between them are merged into a bout: one row that says the stretch ran from 2:14 to 2:51. That is the unit a person actually means when they say “I snored for half an hour.”
When the classifier is not sure
Sometimes something is loud enough to matter and the model still will not commit. The tempting move is to throw it away. That is the wrong move, because you end up with a chart full of spikes and nothing to listen to, and no way to tell a quiet night from a broken one.
Instead the loudest of those are kept as loud moments: real clips, marked on the chart, that you can play in the morning. Then you tell the app what it was. If you say snoring, it joins your sounds and the night's numbers are recalculated. If you say it was the fan, it stops being counted as you.
What you get out of it
An honest report. Not “you were loud for 41 minutes,” but “you snored in six bouts, talked twice at 12:37 and 2:14, and the dog accounted for the two biggest spikes.” Those are different sentences, and only one of them helps you do something differently tomorrow.
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