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.