Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 owners are getting a beta this week that adds a set of audio features to Siri, including the ability to recall the last 15 seconds of speech and to summarize conversations over the course of a day. The collection, which Apple calls Audio Intelligence, includes four tools: music recognition, sound recognition, Live Rewind and Siri Recap. All four are opt-in, meaning users must enable them during setup before they work.
Music recognition and sound recognition have been available since launch. The Shazam integration now identifies songs without the app being opened, and identified tracks appear automatically in the watch's Smart Stack. Sound Recognition alerts people who are deaf or hard of hearing to sounds such as a crying baby, a barking dog or a doorbell, and is turned on through Settings > Accessibility > Sound and Name Recognition on the paired iPhone, where users can choose which sounds to detect.
Live Rewind is triggered by double-clicking the Digital Crown, which brings up transcribed text of what was said in the previous 15 seconds. The text vanishes if the user does nothing, but it can also be queried through Siri or saved to the Siri app for viewing later on the phone. Older audio is continuously overwritten and deleted, so anything not recalled is gone. Apple's keynote example showed someone reviewing a restaurant's specials after the server had left the table.
Siri Recap listens in the background while enabled and produces summaries and key points from conversations throughout the day, whether a parent-teacher conference, a work meeting or an impromptu brainstorming session. Notes can be saved to the Siri app and exported to Notes or Journal, or deleted, and they are removed automatically after seven days. Users can leave it on continuously, schedule it around meetings, or switch it on from a new Siri Recap icon in Control Center; morning reminders flag when it is still on.
The feature does not work on conference calls or FaceTime when AirPods or headphones are connected, since it only captures audio through the watch's speaker. Apple says the features will not affect battery life: the Series 12 gets roughly a day and a half of use and the Ultra 4 between two and a half and three days, aided by the new S11 chip's dual architecture, which handles background tasks without drawing on the main processor.
According to Apple, the watch does not store audio. Raw audio is processed inside a hardware-isolated compartment on the S11 chip called the Secure Exclave, which Apple says it cannot access. Siri Recap does not send a full transcript to the cloud; the text is condensed first, the transcript is deleted, and only the condensed version goes to Private Cloud Compute, with financial data, authentication details, personal identifiers, language related to self-harm and government secrets omitted.
Even with those protections, the notion of granting a wrist-worn device the ability to listen to conversations is uncomfortable for some, particularly when other people involved may not know it is happening.
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