I thought the idea of the smart alarm was that I am already partially awake and so it is better to be woken at 7:00 than to fall into deeper sleep and be woken up during deep sleep?
It frequently does, but not always. Maybe it am just deeply asleep and it estimated my alertness wrong, or maybe the alarm is not functioning correctly, I don’t know.
Yes, as long as possible.
Sounding the backup alarm at 7:20 when I have not woken up from the gentle alarm means I am in deep sleep and will be startled.
Yes, and it should not be doing this last resort before the actual alarm time that I set.
The idea of smart alarm is to trigger the alarm in light sleep phase, even if it means a few minutes before the actual alarm time.
The idea of back alarm is, that if you were not woken up by gradually more prominent alarm, the alarm is not slowly bringing you from light sleep into awake as expected. So there is a big risk of shifting back to deep sleep, or completely oversleep.
After 20 minutes, the gentle ringtone is already at 95% of the max volume. And this does not bring you from sleep at all.
The back up alarm is at 100%, and has a different ringtone - and this startles you.
So it seems like the regular alarm, even at almost max volume is not waking you up, but the combination of max volume and the ringtone change is too much, and makes your wake up process too sudden.
We need to find a middle ground.
Would you be open to try a playlist instead of a single ringtone? You might be too used to the current one, so your brain can partially ignore it, even when it plays really loud.
Or if the max volume is what you need to be woken up, lowering the gentle volume to 18 minutes will bring the max volume before the alarm time-out, while still keeping the same ringtone.
If you feel the smart alarm needs fine-tuning, go to Settings → Alarms → Smart wake up, and lower the sensitivity. This will slightly shift the algorithms.
Could setting the alarm timeout fix this?
I fell asleep again this morning after listening to my alarm. My Backup alarm then came on over an hour later.
I discovered various time settings available for alarm timeout. The Backup alarm comes on after the Alarm timeout period.
Could you please use the Left ≡ menu → (?) Support → Report a bug, and send the application logs? I do not have any access to your data, unless you share them with me.
It depends on how many events have happened since the alarm time.
But because there is no pause between the regular alarm and the backup alarm, the second alarm from 07:09 is probably not the backup alarm, but the second round of alarms, after even the backup alarm ended. The timings all depend on your configuration, hopefully it will still be in the logs.