Differentiating between notifications - different sounds in gchat or ?

July 13, 2020 3:31 PM

Mr. Arnicae and I use gchat to share cat videos but also occasionally for time sensitive quesitons like "What kind of pasta do you want" and "please call the plumber, water is geysering through the ceiling". Is there any way to make our phones emit a different sounding alert in gchat (or something other android app) to indicate to the recipient a response is time sensitive? I'm imagining something along the lines of a doorbell chime or something. Phone calls are not an option for snowflake-reasons.
posted by arnicae to Technology (5 answers total)

I don't know offhand of an app that will allow you to set sensitive with different sounds - hopefully someone will come along with that. But if not, what about two apps? gchat for everyday pasta concerns and something else set to a more urgent-sounding tone used only for the time-sensitive stuff.
posted by Stacey at 3:48 PM on July 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

Following this with interest, as since having a kid, and also with both of us having SO MANY communication options, I dearly wish for something that is essentially a 100% reliable, always on pager with 2 options - one meaning "there is something I need you to pay attention to NOW", and the other meaning the same as the above, but essentially a "there is something I need you to pay attention to NOW and it is an EXTREME EMERGENCY".

Our solution such as it is so far is using If This Then That to allow my partner to override my phone's mute settings by ringing 3 times in a row, but it's still not 100% reliable.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 4:00 PM on July 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is using different chat apps for different kinds of communication a possibility?
posted by mekily at 4:24 PM on July 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

In general I've only seen this work with different modes of communication or different apps, e.g. normal chatting happens over hangouts/gchat or whatever, but important stuff garners an SMS or a phone call, since you can set different alert tones for each of them. If SMS is a nonstarter, you could always use a different app for important messages. I like Telegram, but there's a wide variety of them out there and I haven't tried enough of them to offer any real recommendations.
posted by Aleyn at 6:50 PM on July 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

You could set up a free slack just for the two of you, and have different channels for different things (and then you can set up notifications for each channel accordingly).
posted by misskaz at 5:24 AM on July 14, 2020 [1 favorite]