When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence . Contributor, Tech Advisor
While novel, Apple’s new Audio Intelligence capabilities raise a ton of privacy concerns for users and the people around them
Of all the features announced for the Apple Watch Series 12 and the Apple Watch Ultra 4, it was the AI-driven, always-on Audio Intelligence that drummed up the most debate, and now its most divisive aspects are being rolled out to users via the watchOS 27.3 developer beta. Audio Intelligence acts as an umbrella term, including features such as the benign Music Recognition (which acts as an automatic Shazam), but it’s the Live Rewind and Siri Recap abilities that garnered the most attention for the way they’re constantly eavesdropping on any conversations you have. Live Rewind lets you catch something that’s been said in the last 15 seconds that you may have missed, while Siri Recap provides summaries of conversations you’ve had throughout the day.
Two different use cases, but both features involve the Apple Watch listening to you at all times in the background – a concept that hasn’t been warmly received by many, largely for the privacy concerns raised. Apple has been keen to stress that audio is not stored and can’t be accessed in any way, and the Siri Recap summaries are deleted after seven days unless you save them. Thomas Deehan / Foundry
Although it’ll still be a while before these features are made available in a public version of watchOS 27, the fact that they’re now live in the developer beta means that Apple hasn’t been dissuaded by the concerns raised, and is keen to push forward. Only time will tell if these Audio Intelligence features end up being popular, but the fact that they’ve appeared at all on an Apple Watch means that it won’t be too long before competitors start to implement their own version of the idea. By comparison, Samsung doubled down on health and fitness tracking for its latest round of wearables, with new stats being recorded such as Vascular Load and Daily Cardio Load from the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 and the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2.
Read More
