Original Poster

Sep 13, 2021

How do I prevent Google Assistant from randomly reading notifications out loud?

A couple days ago Google Assistant started sporadically announcing who some of my messages were from. I don't have headphones in. My phone is locked and in my pocket, and it will just announce who I received a message from. It doesn't do it every time, it's only once every day or two. It's a small percentage of my messages, but I don't understand why it's doing it. It also sometimes reads my calendar events aloud, but not for most of them. Again the phone is locked, no headphones. It's just announcing things to the world. Why is it doing this???

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Recommended Answer

Original Poster

Sep 28, 2021

Turning off spoken notifications under the headphone settings solved the issue for me. Of course, I actually liked the spoken notifications when I was wearing headphones, so it's not an ideal solution, but at least it's not announcing my messages aloud to everyone in the vicinity.

Product Expert Alumni James M. recommended this

Helpful?

All Replies (12)

Sep 25, 2021

I'm having this issue as well on a brand new Xperia 1iii running android 11. For the first several days no issue then suddenly it is randomly reading aloud my notifications with no headphones plugged in and it's quite awful for privacy reasons. Assistant also seems to keep reminding me of what I can do (tutorial style notifications) repeatedly for things Ive already heard about.

Product Expert Alumni

Sep 26, 2021

Limit interruptions with Do Not Disturb on Android

https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335

Original Poster

Recommended Answer

Sep 28, 2021

Turning off spoken notifications under the headphone settings solved the issue for me. Of course, I actually liked the spoken notifications when I was wearing headphones, so it's not an ideal solution, but at least it's not announcing my messages aloud to everyone in the vicinity.

Product Expert Alumni James M. recommended this

Sep 29, 2021

This post is for the benefit of the other people saying they are having this problem as well. I'm not necessarily asking for troubleshooting here. Just hoping to help figure out any similarities we may have in hopes of figuring out what's causing this issue.

I have a Google Pixel 3a (that I've had for more than a year now). Google Fi is my provider. My Pixel 3a started announcing calendar notifications today (quite loudly, I might add) seemingly out of nowhere.

My last system update was September 5, 2021; that's almost a month ago, so I wouldn't think that was causing it.
My calendar had an update yesterday, but the notifications didn't start till this afternoon (notifications from this morning were standard pop-up notifications).
I have too have had it happening only on some of my notifications not all of them.
I can see my notification history and the ones that were read aloud show right along with the rest of my notifications that were not read aloud.

I will definitely try turning off my spoken notifications, but it sounds like this may be a bug?

Update from original post:

I just checked my spoken notifications settings (under "headphones" settings). They were turned on for messages, messenger and Google Voice, but they were already turned off for my calendar.

As I said above, I've had this phone for over a year with no issue like this. I did not change my settings today. I DID turn my volume off (then back on) before this started, but I didn't do anything differently that normal. I also checked my accessibility settings, thinking it could be something there, but I can't find anything that I can figure might be causing this.

Last edited Sep 29, 2021

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