Features
Ask why you keep waking at 3am and get an answer about your nights
Charts tell you what happened. The awkward part is the next question, the one about why, and that is the one the coach is built for.
The sleep coach is a chat tab inside Tock that reads your recent nights before it answers. It can quote your score, play back a clip Tock recorded, and navigate the app to change a setting on your behalf. It needs a network connection.
- Tab of its own, no menu digging
- 1Tab of its own, no menu digging
- Metrics it can pull from your nights
- 21Metrics it can pull from your nights
- Insight groups it reads across
- 7Insight groups it reads across
How it actually works
What the coach can see, and what it can do about it
The coach lives in its own tab, and it is the mascot, so you are talking to the same character that sleeps on your Home Screen rather than to a generic assistant bolted on the side. Ask it why you keep waking at 3am and it goes and looks: your recent nights, your score and what fed it, the stretches you slept in, the sounds it classified. It can play a clip back at you mid-conversation, so the sentence "you were talking at 02:40" arrives with the 02:40 attached.
It can also move around the app for you. Ask for a quieter wake tone, a longer wind-down or a different mission and it can take you to the screen and make the change, instead of telling you which three taps to do. Because the reasoning happens in the cloud rather than on the phone, the coach needs a network connection. Everything else in Tock keeps working offline, the coach just waits.
- It reads a run of recent nights, not one number in isolation
- It can play the audio it is talking about instead of describing it
- It can navigate to a setting and change it for you
The coach talks about patterns in your own nights. It is not medical advice, and Tock is not a medical device.
Questions that get a useful answer
The coach is at its best with a specific question about a specific stretch of nights, and at its weakest with something a search engine could answer.
- Why was last night worse than Tuesday
- What changed in the week my score dropped
- What woke me at 03:12
- Is my bedtime as inconsistent as it feels
Let it change the setting rather than explaining it
The most underused thing about the coach is that it does not have to hand you instructions. If the answer to a conversation is a shorter wind-down or a gentler tone, ask it to make the change and it will take you there and do it.
That matters most at the point where advice usually dies, which is the gap between agreeing with something and going to find the switch.
Why it wants a few nights first
On day one the coach has almost nothing to read, so it will answer in generalities. After a week it can talk about your Tuesdays. After a month it can talk about your Tuesdays compared with your Sundays.
Nothing you ask it changes what Tock records. Tracking runs on the phone whether you ever open this tab or not.
Where it stops
Every feature has an edge. Better you read it here than find it at six in the morning.
- It needs a network connection. On a plane or with no signal, the coach is the one part of Tock that stops working.
- It only knows what Tock recorded. A night you did not track is a night it cannot discuss.
- It cannot diagnose anything, and it will not try. Persistent problems belong with a doctor, not a chat tab.
- Give it a week of nights. On day one there is nothing personal for it to read.
Questions people ask
Does the coach work offline?
No. It reasons in the cloud, so it needs a connection. Tracking, alarms, missions and sounds all run on the phone without one.
Can it really change settings for me?
Yes. It can navigate to the screen in question and make the change, which is usually faster than being told where the setting lives.
What does it know about me?
Your recent nights in Tock: scores, stretches, estimated stages, the sounds it classified, your tags and check-ins. It answers from those rather than from generic advice.
Is it a replacement for seeing a doctor?
No. It talks about patterns in your nights. It does not diagnose, and Tock is not a medical device.
The rest of the app
The parts that sit closest to this one.
- Sleep scoreThe sleep score is a single number for a night, sitting at the top of that night detail view. Underneath it are the parts that produced it, and across nights the insights cover 21 metrics in 7 groups plus long-run measures like sleep regularity and sleep debt.
- Sleep trackingSleep tracking in Tock runs on the phone alone. The microphone and the accelerometer stay awake all night, Apple SoundAnalysis labels sounds like snoring, coughing and sleep talking on device, and the clips are saved so you can play them back in the morning.
- Wind-downWind-down is a short guided routine you run before sleep. It has 6 steps you can reorder or drop, three lengths, and a 30 second drift at the end that hands you over to the good-night screen.
- Snore recordingTock keeps short audio clips of the things it hears in the night and pins each one to the minute it happened. Snoring, coughing and sleep talking are labelled by name, and every clip has a play button in the morning.
Elsewhere on the site
Different corner of the same problem.
- Wake tonesLoud alarm soundsTock's alarms ring through silent mode and through a Focus because they are built on Apple's AlarmKit, not on an app keeping audio alive in the background. What no app can do is raise your iPhone's hardware volume for you. Loudness gets your eyes open; the wake-up mission is what stops you dismissing it and going straight back to sleep.
- Head to headAutoSleep vs Sleep CycleIf you already wear an Apple Watch to bed, AutoSleep reads a night that Sleep Cycle can only estimate from the room. If you don't own a Watch and don't want one, Sleep Cycle is the only one of the two that works, and it's your alarm as well.
- Sleep soundsStreamA small stream is mostly mid and high frequency water noise with very little below a couple of hundred hertz, so it sounds alive and close but has almost nothing to fight a passing truck with. It suits a quiet bedroom where you want an alternative to silence, not a room you are trying to defend.
- Tock for youRotating shift nursesYour rota moves you from days to nights and back again, sometimes inside the same week, and there is no schedule to settle into because the schedule keeps changing. Every adjustment gets interrupted by the next one.
- AlternativesTock vs SnoreLabSnoreLab is better if snoring is the only thing you care about and you want a remedy-tracking loop and a score you can show someone. Tock is better if you want the snoring inside a full night, with the alarm, the estimated stages and the score in one app instead of two running overnight.
- RoundupsThe best sleep trackers that don't need a watchTock is the best sleep tracker without a watch. Leave the phone on the nightstand and it uses the microphone and accelerometer all night, classifies snores, coughs and sleep talking on device, and hands you a report plus the audio in the morning. SleepScore is the strongest alternative if you would rather nothing listened to the room.
Ask why you keep waking at 3am and get an answer about your nights
The sleep coach is a chat tab inside Tock that reads your recent nights before it answers. It can quote your score, play back a clip Tock recorded, and navigate the app to change a setting on your behalf. It needs a network connection.