What running apps actually say out loud

Screenshots show the screen. Nothing shows the voice. Audio cues are the one part of a running app you cannot inspect before you install it.

Why no app publishes its wording

Nobody asks for it.

A cue list is easy to write, and it still does not get written. Wording is treated as a detail of the interface, and audio is the part of an interface that never appears in a store listing. The exact sentence decides several things you notice inside the first kilometre.

• Which pace a split reads. Your average for the whole run, or the pace of that one lap: both are common and they are different numbers.
• Whether the announcement lands at a distance you chose or one the app fixed for you.
• Whether numbers arrive as recorded words or as digits handed to a speech engine, which changes how they survive wind and cheap earbuds.
• Whether a signal gap gets any word at all.
• Talk between splits, and whether you can stop it without silencing the splits too.

What Strava and Runna actually document

Strava quotes nothing.

Its Audio Announcements article describes start, stop and pause announcements for runs, rides and walks, split updates at every half mile or kilometre and at every full mile or kilometre for runs and trail runs only, and Live Segments as a subscription feature. No spoken sentence appears anywhere on the page.

Runna's audio cues page gives one split example, 1 km completed in 5:50 min/km, plus a treadmill variant that adds average speed. That is the only verbatim spoken output on the page. The rest lists which cue types reach a phone, an Apple Watch, a Garmin or a Suunto.

Every line Runflake can speak, with its trigger

Twenty nine entries sit in the published inventory, and twenty seven of them are lines a runner can hear on a run. The other two are recorded but nothing in the app plays them, and they are listed under their own heading below so that nobody reads a feature into them.

Run state is the shortest category. At the start the coach says exactly Go. Pausing says Paused. and resuming says Resumed., whether you pressed the button or the app paused itself.

A run picked up again after the app was killed does not get a second start cue.

Recorded but never played

Two strings sit in the pack that no run will produce. Run complete. is recorded, and it is never played. What you hear at the finish is a short finish tone. The second is the single word point, which exists in the number pack while no announcement contains a decimal, so no distance is ever read as three point one.

The split announcement, word for word

One fixed order, every time. Distance, then time, then average pace, each introduced by its own label. Nothing is reordered and nothing is dropped for brevity. Numbers are spoken as recorded words rather than digits, so it is three kilometers and not 3 kilometers. The recorded pack covers zero through fifty-nine. Singular and plural are handled, so one kilometre reads as one kilometer.

A full announcement of that kind runs about nine and a half seconds of speech, which is also how long your music stays lowered at each marker.

Interval calls, course calls and pause calls

Short cues, one phrase each. Each one maps to a state change. None of them carries a number.

Entering the warm-up is silent, because it lands immediately after the start cue. The course calls are slow to fire on purpose: leaving the route is confirmed only after twelve continuous seconds outside the corridor, or forty metres of route progress while outside it, and rejoining is confirmed after eight continuous seconds back inside sixty per cent of that corridor width.

Turns use six phrases and no others: turn left, turn right, bear left, bear right, keep straight, make a U-turn. Each corner is announced with a distance in front of it, as in In 100 meters, turn right., then again at the corner itself with the distance dropped, unless the advance warning already landed within fifty metres of it. Spoken distances are rounded down before they are read, to the nearest fifty metres above one hundred and the nearest ten below it, so you never hear an odd figure like in 117 meters.

The optional Pacer lines, and why they are off by default

Pacer is the chatty mode. It is off unless you switch it on, so out of the box the coach only reports things that happened and never offers encouragement.

Switched on, it adds a mid-split pace report at each half kilometre or half mile, spoken as Pace five minutes fourteen seconds. That report is skipped entirely when there is no recent pace, and no made-up number goes in its place. The encouragement lines are chosen by comparing your recent pace with your run average.

Two rows are worth pulling out. When there is no basis to judge pace, the coach uses a line about where you are in the run instead of inventing a number, and the halfway and three quarter calls exist only while you follow a set route, because on a free run the app does not know where the end is. Talking is capped. Encouragement comes at most once every two minutes of moving time, with a ceiling of thirty lines per run, and it stays quiet for forty five seconds after any other cue and within sixty metres of a marker, so it never steps on a split.

What is fixed and cannot be changed

None of this is a setting, so there is no point hunting for it in the menus.

• The announcement interval. Every kilometre in metric units, every whole mile in imperial, shown on the settings screen as a read-only value beside an on and off switch instead of pretending to be a choice.
• The order of the split sentence, and the labels in front of each number.
• The six turn phrases.
• Ranking between cues. Pause and resume outrank everything, turn and interval calls outrank the kilometre readout, and pacer talk sits at the bottom. A more urgent cue cuts off a less urgent one already playing.
• Late cues. One that has waited more than twelve seconds is thrown away instead of read late, on the reasoning that a late announcement is a wrong announcement.
• Signal gaps. Crossing several markers at once produces one announcement, the last one, not a backlog.

What you can change is which categories speak at all. Each has its own switch, so you can silence splits and keep interval calls, or keep only pause and resume. Music ducking can be switched off. Changes take effect mid run, and turning the coach back on part way through does not replay a kilometre you already heard.

Why the wording is a table and not a model

Speaking is a table lookup. Every word the coach can say is a fixed string written in the app's source, and playback comes from audio files bundled with the app, produced once, offline, by a build script rather than synthesised over the network while you run.

There is no language model and no network request anywhere in the speaking path.

The engine is deterministic in a specific sense: no random number generator and no clock of its own, so the same run data produces the same words at the same points. That is what makes a published cue list possible at all. A build check fails if the captions on the marketing site drift from what the app really says, or if the published audio is swapped for a different recording, and a second check fails if any recorded clip turns out to be silent.

Determinism has a limit. Two identical runs can produce a different number of announcements. The words are fixed, but the set of cues that reaches your ears is not, because a cue that waits too long is dropped and a cue landing on top of another is skipped.

The recorded voice, and where the phone's own voice takes over

Two options, and that is the whole choice. The recorded pack, or your phone's built-in voice. No personalities, no downloadable voices. Even on the recorded pack, some sentences come from the phone. Turn instructions always do, because the guidance distances fall outside the recorded number range, which stops at fifty-nine, and any single announcement containing a number of sixty or more is spoken entirely by the phone's voice, so the voice never changes halfway through a sentence.

That voice is the system speech engine, AVSpeechSynthesizer on iOS and TextToSpeech on Android, and which voice you get is decided by your own phone settings and not by the app, so two runners on the same app can hear the same turn read in different voices. That is normal, not a fault. Spoken language is English or Korean only, and every other phone language falls back to English cues. That is worth knowing before you rely on the voice instead of the screen.

How to check any app's cue wording before you install it

Check the help centre, not the store listing. Most of this can be settled before you install anything.

1. Search the help centre, not the store pageStore descriptions say audio cues and stop there. Help centres list the actual toggles because support staff need them. Search the app name together with the words audio cues or announcements.
2. Count the options, then hunt for a quoted sentenceNote how many cue types exist and whether any wording is quoted. Of the two pages checked for this post, one quoted nothing and the other quoted a single split.
3. Establish whether the interval is yours or theirsHalf unit, full unit, a distance you set, or a fixed value with no setting at all. This decides how often you are interrupted, and it is the setting people most often assume exists.
4. Find out which pace it readsAverage pace for the whole run and pace for the last lap are both normal and they are different numbers, and if the page does not say, assume you will not know until you are out there.
5. Look for the failure casesWhat is said when the signal drops, when you pause, when several markers pass during a gap. Documentation is usually silent here, and it is the part you notice first on the road.
6. Listen for one lap before you commitRun a single lap of a known distance with earbuds in, on a route you would have run anyway, and write down the first full sentence you hear, because it tells you the order, the units, the pace type and the voice.

Train alone with nothing on your wrist and the wording is the whole interface for most of the run. Give it the scrutiny you give the screen. If that is your setup, running with only your phone covers what the rest of the arrangement costs you.