What it's for
The doorbell, while you're on a call
Headphones on, deep in a meeting. Clicky Icky flashes the screen when the bell goes.
How often the dog next door barks
Leave it running overnight. Every bark gets a timestamp you can paste into a spreadsheet.
A faint mechanical noise
A relay, a drip, a bearing. Anything you'd otherwise have to sit and wait for.
Anything that makes a noise twice
If you can make the sound once for it, Clicky Icky can watch for it. Including Grandma.
Three steps
- Teach it. Hold the record button, make the sound, let go. Clicky Icky tells you whether the capture is any good, and asks for a couple more takes so it recognises the sound from across the room as well as up close.
- Set the alert. Flash the screen, play a sound of your choosing, buzz, or post a notification — the one alert that still reaches you with the app in the background.
- Listen. Start a session and leave it. Stop after an hour, at a set time, or when you say so. Every detection lands in a log you can copy out as CSV.
The audio never leaves your device
Not as an upload, not as a file, not as anything. This is the part worth being precise about, so here is exactly what happens.
- Nothing is recorded. Sound is analysed on the audio thread in 20-millisecond windows and thrown away. There is no buffer, no file, and nothing to play back.
- Only 110 Hz to 11 kHz is examined. Everything outside that is discarded before anything is stored or compared.
- A saved sound is a shape, not a recording. 28 normalised numbers every 10 milliseconds, with loudness and phase removed. It cannot be played back as the original.
- No network, at all. No accounts, no analytics, no fonts, no CDN. The browser enforces this, not just the code: Clicky Icky is served with a policy that forbids it from contacting anything.
- It works with the device offline. Turn off wifi and mobile data and it behaves identically, which is the simplest proof of the rest.
One honest caveat: a stored sound is a coarse spectral envelope, and at 28 bands that is enough to resynthesise a rough sketch of what was captured — the app has a button that does exactly this, so you can judge a recording by ear. Only the short template you deliberately recorded is ever stored, and it stays on your device.
Honest limits
- With the screen off or the app swiped away, Android may suspend it and detection stops. Keep the screen awake and the phone plugged in for a long run.
- Another app with exclusive use of the microphone can starve it. Worth testing against your own call setup before relying on it.
- It is a practical detector, not an instrument. It is very good at "that noise, again" and claims nothing beyond it.
Go and teach it something
Open Clicky IckyAdd it to your home screen from the app and it runs like any other app.