Apple’s introduction today of the Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Apple Watch Series 12 marks a significant milestone in the devices’ history. The addition of two new agentic tools—Live Rewind and Siri Recap—repositions the wearables from devices primarily focused on health to ones that also act as an always-listening AI assistant strapped to your wrist.
Of course, with these features come privacy concerns—not just for the person wearing the Apple Watch, but for those around them. The way Apple has chosen to address these concerns highlights how the company is applying its existing privacy ethos to the AI world we now inhabit.
More interestingly, it also hints at how Apple may address growing public unease around the next wearable market it plans to enter: smart glasses.
One of the biggest draws of the new Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Apple Watch Series 12 that Apple announced today is what the company calls “Audio Intelligence.” That banner actually refers to four new AI-powered features.
The first two are nothing too groundbreaking, since they have existed in some form in some of Apple’s other products for a while. The new Apple Watches will now automatically listen for playing music and, using the company’s Shazam service, display the song’s name on a widget on your watch’s screen.
The watches will also constantly listen for sounds like alarms, a crying baby, and doorbells, and warn the user when it detects them. This latter feature is particularly beneficial for those with hearing impairments.
But the two remaining Audio Intelligence features are quite novel.
One is called Siri Recap, which creates summaries of your conversations so you can review the details later. These aren’t transcriptions, but AI-generated synopses with all the relevant points. Such a feature can be particularly beneficial in workplace meetings because they enable you to remain engaged with the people around you during the meeting itself, instead of having to have your eyes on a screen jotting down notes. Siri Recap does the note-taking for you, automatically.
The other new Audio Intelligence feature is called Live Rewind. This one allows you to see the last 15 seconds of a conversation transcribed as text on your Apple Watch’s display. It works like this: Your Apple Watch Ultra 4 or Apple Watch Series 12 constantly listens to your conversations and stores them locally, and briefly, on your Apple Watch in buffers of roughly 15 seconds, which are continually overwritten.
When you activate Live Rewind, the previous 15-second buffer will be transcribed and displayed on your screen. Apple says Live Rewind is useful when someone quickly mentions information you may not have fully absorbed, such as recipe instructions or a book recommendation.
It goes without saying that when many people hear about these new “Audio Intelligence” features, the first thought that comes to mind is a concern about privacy. Specifically: Do these new Apple Watch features—particularly Siri Recap and Live Rewind—mean that Apple is now privy to every conversation you have?
That answer is a definitive “no”—and for several reasons.
First, all four Audio Intelligence features are opt-in. The user must enable them, or else they remain completely nonfunctional. Second, Apple designed Audio Intelligence so that recordings remain completely inaccessible to the Apple Watch’s operating system (watchOS), other apps on the Apple Watch, Apple itself, and even the user.
This inaccessibility is achieved via a new Secure Exclave on the S11 chipset found in the Ultra 4 and Series 12. That exclave processes and analyzes audio data and keeps it sequestered, but it never permanently stores audio recordings; it deletes them after processing.
When it comes to Live Rewind, that rolling 15-second buffer is continually overwritten, and when you initiate the feature’s transcription capabilities, it runs locally on your Apple Watch, so the audio data is never sent to Apple.
As for Siri Recap, the feature permanently deletes the raw audio after on-device speech recognition transcribes it into text. This text is then sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC) for processing and summarization before being returned to the user. By design, Apple can’t access data sent to its private cloud.
These protections may reassure Apple Watch owners that Apple isn’t snooping on them. But what about members of the general public who are already increasingly wary of the possibility that AI-powered smart devices worn by others are encroaching on their privacy?
Apple seems to have considered potential public backlash and devised ways to protect the privacy of those around the Apple Watch wearer preemptively.
When it comes to Siri Recap, Apple says that the privacy of others is preserved because Siri Recap not only doesn’t create a permanent recording of an interaction but also doesn’t transcribe a conversation verbatim. Instead, it uses AI to generate a “high-level summary” that, by design, does not identify speakers or attribute content to them. Siri Recap summaries also strip out potentially sensitive information, such as government-assigned identifiers like Social Security numbers, financial data, and authentication data.
As for Live Rewind, Apple notes that recorded audio is buffered and constantly overwritten. Any temporarily captured audio is transcribed only locally on the device when the Apple Watch wearer double-presses the Digital Crown—and the wearer can’t do that secretly.
That’s because whenever an Apple Watch user initiates Live Rewind, the Apple Watch produces an audible alert so that people around the wearer know the feature is being used. This alert sounds to the public even if the Apple Watch user has muted their watch or has headphones connected.
This safety measure also offers a clue about how Apple could address the public’s potential privacy concerns with its rumored smart glasses, which may launch as soon as next year.
Meta’s smart glasses have drawn significant backlash, with some calling them “pervert glasses” because of worries the wearable could be used to record people without their knowledge.
The privacy measures Apple introduced today on its new Apple Watches suggest the company may build similar public-facing alerts into its next AI-powered wearable.