How to set up spoken splits for a run

Three decisions, and none is the one people spend time on. Whether the announcement is on, and which unit it counts in. Then what happens to your music while the app talks. Everything else on a voice settings screen can wait until you have heard the app speak once.

This is a setup guide, not a repair guide.

If your cues were working and then went quiet, that is a separate problem with four separate causes, covered in why your running app voice cues go silent. If you want the wording itself before you commit to an app, what running apps actually say out loud lists it.

Switch the announcement on and check the units

In metric the marker is a completed kilometre. In imperial it is a whole mile, 1,609.344 m, so the same run produces fewer announcements and each one covers more ground. Turn the announcement on first, then set the units, because the units decide when the app speaks as well as what it says. The two usually live on different screens: units are a display preference that also governs the spoken numbers, while the announcement switch sits in an audio or voice section. Set the unit you actually think in.

If you plan your training in miles and the coach counts kilometres, every cue needs mental arithmetic at the moment you are least equipped to do it.

1. Find the voice or audio sectionUsually under the app's settings, occasionally inside the run screen instead. The names vary: audio cues, voice coach, audio feedback, announcements.
2. Turn the split announcement onThis is the one that reads distance, time and average pace at each marker. Leave the other categories alone for now.
3. Set your unitsMetric or imperial. Set it before your first run, not after.
4. Read the line under the switchA settings screen that is telling you the truth states the interval it will use, for example every 1 km or every 1 mi. If that line and the spoken cue disagree on units, the cue is what actually happened.

What happens to your music while a cue plays

The app does not turn your music down. It asks the operating system to, and the operating system decides how far the volume drops. Apple describes its option as one that reduces the volume of other audio sessions while audio from this session plays, and adds that "Ducking begins when you activate your app's audio session and ends when you deactivate the session" (Apple developer documentation, duckOthers, fetched 2 August 2026).

There is no depth in that interface for an app to set.

Android moved the same job into the system. Its audio focus documentation states that "Automatic ducking (temporarily reducing the audio level of one app so that another can be heard clearly) was introduced in Android 8.0 (API level 26). By having the system implement ducking, you don't have to implement ducking in your app" (Android developer documentation, audio focus, fetched 2 August 2026). The same page carries an exception worth knowing before you blame your running app: automatic ducking is not performed when the user is listening to speech content, because the user might miss some of the programme, and it adds that an app playing spoken content should pause instead. So your music is turned down for you, while a podcast either pauses itself or plays straight through the cue, depending on how that app was written.

Runflake defaults to lowering the music and puts the alternative on the same screen, a switch that keeps music at full volume with the voice layered on top. The number worth knowing is duration, not depth: a full kilometre announcement is about 9.5 seconds of speech, so that is how long music stays down at each marker.

Volume, headphones and bone conduction

Set the volume while sound plays.

With nothing playing, the volume keys may be moving the ringer rather than media, and the road is a poor place to find that out. Then test with the headphones you will actually wear, at the volume you would actually use: open ear and bone conduction designs do not seal the ear canal, which is the point of them, so whatever your route sounds like is part of the test and cannot be settled indoors. With sealed headphones the question is usually the other one, whether a dip in the music at every marker is worth the words.

Cue categories you can silence separately

A single master switch is blunt. After two runs your question is narrower than on or off: keep the interval calls and drop the kilometre readout, or keep pause announcements and nothing else.

What you want is a settings screen split by category. Runflake is arranged that way, and its categories are a reasonable checklist to hold any app against:

• A master switch for the coach as a whole
• Pacer, the chattier mode that adds pace calls and encouragement between splits. It is off unless you turn it on, so out of the box the coach reports things that happened and never offers encouragement
• Distance and pace, the split readout itself, with the interval printed beneath it
• Interval cues for workout transitions, and Course and turns for route guidance
• Pause and resume
• A voice choice with exactly two options, the recorded pack or your phone's own built in voice
• Switches outside the coach card entirely for the finish sound, the countdown beeps and the music lowering, because a beep is a signal and not speech, and should not vanish when you silence the talking. The same reasoning sends the cues through the iPhone silent switch: a coaching cue is treated as something you asked for, not as media

One limit on that screen is not a setting at all: spoken language is English or Korean, and any other phone language falls back to English cues, so a coach speaking a language you do not follow at a glance is a coach you will turn off. Check that in whatever app you choose.

Intervals that some apps fix on purpose

The setting may not exist. If you cannot find a way to change how often the app speaks, that is sometimes deliberate, and at least one app says so in its own documentation.

Feedback distance can be adjusted for free runs only, it can't be changed for guided plan sessions.

Runna support, Setting Up and Managing Your Audio Cues, fetched 2 August 2026

That reasoning generalises. A guided session has already decided what its intervals are, so letting a runner announce every 300 m turns coaching into noise.

Runflake goes further and fixes it for every run: every completed kilometre in metric, every whole mile in imperial with the closing words per mile, and its settings screen prints that value as a read only line beside the switch, not as a menu that leads nowhere.

Testing the setup on a two minute walk

Test before you run. This failure mode is audible, not visible. Nothing on screen tells you a cue was too quiet to make out.

1. Start the music you would actually run toAt the volume you would actually use. A test against silence proves nothing, since the whole question is what happens when two sounds want the same output.
2. Play a sample cue while the music runsSome voice settings screens can play a sample. Runflake's Preview speaks the same script a real split uses, so pressing it with music playing is where you hear the difference between lowering the music and leaving it alone, without covering a kilometre first.
3. Start a run, lock the screen and pocket the phoneWalk it. This is the state the phone will be in for the whole run, so it is the state worth testing. If you are running from the phone alone, how you carry it is part of the setup, not an afterthought.
4. Finish the test run and delete itTwo minutes of walking is the kind of small thing that makes a weekly total awkward to read later. Deleting often lives on the run's own screen in your history, not on the finish screen, so look there when it is not where you expected.

Listen for two things only.

Whether the music dips, and whether you can make out the words over it. If it does not dip when you expected it to, check whether you are playing spoken word audio and whether the lowering switch is on.

Changing a setting in the middle of a run

Assume nothing applies until you have seen it apply. Some apps patch the live session the moment you move a switch, while others read their settings once when the run starts, so your change does nothing at all until the next run. Nothing on screen distinguishes the two, so find out once on a run you do not care about.

In Runflake the switches reach the live session: turning a setting off takes effect immediately, mid run, and turning the coach back on part way through does not replay a kilometre you already heard. The second half matters more than it sounds. An app that rebuilds its coach when a setting changes can announce a split you passed twenty minutes ago, which is worse than the silence you were trying to fix.

If you do have to change something mid run, do it while walking and leave the run recording rather than stopping it. And if the cues have gone silent, this is no longer a setup question: start with the four causes of silent cues instead of the settings screen.