Question on wake on wrist raise

By peter, 31 December, 2025

Forum
watchOS and Apple Watch Apps

When I walk around with my Apple Watch on, the watch will sometimes turn on and start speaking if I raise my arm or twist my wrist. I would like this not to happen.

In the Watch settings under Display and Brightness I have set:
Wake on wrist raised - on
Wake on crown up - off

With those settings, it isn't surprising that my watch sometimes starts speaking when my arm or wrist moves a certain way.

Here is my quandry:

If I turn off wake on wrist raise, then I can't simply raise my arm, say "hey Siri", and have Siri respond.

I do have Raise to Speak turned on in the Siri settings, so I would have expected that with the Raise to Wake option off in the Display and Brightness section, that Raise to Speak in the Siri settings would let me talk to Siri and get a response and my watch wouldn't otherwise speak at random times with my arm or wrist motions.

Is there some way around this? We seem to have two options for the same or similar effects.

Thanks.

--Pete

Options

Comments

By Michael Hansen on Wednesday, December 31, 2025 - 19:24

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Hi Pete,

In VoiceOver settings (Accessibility> VoiceOver), turn off "Speak on Wake." This will stop VoiceOver from speaking when you raise your wrist as described.

By João Santos on Wednesday, December 31, 2025 - 20:34

It's already bad enough for my watch to wake up when I or something with capacitance touches its screen in a specific way, or when I'm doing pushups and the back of my hand accidentally presses the Digital crown or side buttons, or when I have whatever action I configured perform when my winter garments accidentally press the Action Button, so to me all kinds of automatic wake are totally annoying. I have even tried enabling Water Lock at the gym to no avail, since accidentally pressing the Digital Crown for long enough unlocks the watch. I also don't use Siri that often, since on watchOS of all things it just performs a web search when I ask it for the current date (yes I just tested this on my Ultra 3 with watchOS 26.2 before replying).


Editing to correct watchOS 6.2 to watchOS 26.2.