How to set AirPods to stop reading notifications on iPhone

We all understand AirPods are devices born to serve the needs of listening to music and making hands-free calls. But did you know that every time you receive a call or notification, AirPods can also read them for you?

This is a relatively useful feature, especially in cases where you cannot look at the phone screen to read notifications. However, it can also be annoying in some situations. This article will show you how to set up AirPods to stop reading notifications on iPhone, or only read notifications when you are driving. Let's find out how to do it right below.

Completely turn off the notification reading feature on iPhone

iOS supports a feature called 'Announce Notifications'. When enabled, this feature will use virtual assistant Siri to read to the user the content of incoming notifications, including messages and appointments. In particular, users can also choose to read notifications from third-party applications.

To prevent your iPhone from reading notifications via AirPods, simply navigate to Settings > Notifications > Announce Notifications .

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To completely turn off this feature, simply press the switch on the side to put it in the 'off' state. The feature will be disabled when you use headphones or are using CarPlay.

This setting applies to AirPods (second generation), AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, Beats Solo Pro, Powerbeats Pro, and Powerbeats. It does not work with standard Bluetooth headphones or external speakers.

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In case you want to enable this feature while using CarPlay, you can enable the ' Announce Notifications ' option, but disable the ' Headphones ' option . Tap ' CarPlay ' to make other changes to the notification reading feature, incoming messages.

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Customize the feature of reading notifications and incoming messages

Overall, whether Siri's notification reading feature is really useful or not largely depends on how it is used. It will be less annoying if you take the time to customize which notifications are allowed to be read and vice versa.

Such as. You can customize which apps are notified in Settings > Notifications > Announce Notifications by scrolling down. You will see a list of installed applications. Tap an app to enable or disable the ' Announce Notifications ' feature for it.

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Some apps (like Calendar) let you differentiate between 'time-sensitive notifications' and regular notifications so that only the most important alerts are read. If you enable this setting for an app that doesn't have notifications enabled (in the Settings > Notifications menu ), notifications will be enabled.

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Hope you are succesful.

Micah Soto

Update 08 September 2023