Apple’s Audio Intelligence features for the Apple Watch, the most debated part of the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 announcements, have started to appear for users in the watchOS 27.3 developer beta, according to Tech Advisor. Audio Intelligence is an umbrella term that covers several functions, including Music Recognition, which works as an automatic song-identification tool. The two features that have drawn the most attention are Live Rewind and Siri Recap, because both depend on the watch listening in the background at all times. Public release is still some way off, since the features are only in a developer beta of watchOS 27.
Live Rewind lets a user replay something that was said in the last 15 seconds, which is meant to help when a person misses a word or a sentence in a conversation. Siri Recap produces summaries of the conversations a user has during the day. The two features serve different purposes, but both rely on the watch continuously listening to the user’s surroundings. That has caused concern among privacy advocates and users, because the people around the wearer, who have not agreed to be recorded or processed, are also affected, an issue that Tech Advisor describes as a privacy problem both for users and for those nearby.
Apple has said that the audio is not stored and cannot be accessed by anyone. According to the report, Siri Recap summaries are deleted after seven days unless the user chooses to save them. Apple’s statements address the question of whether recordings are kept, but they do not remove the worry that a device is always listening, and the report does not say how the processing is done or where it takes place. Tech Advisor notes that the arrival of the features in the beta shows that Apple has not been put off by the criticism and intends to go ahead with them.
The report says it is unclear whether Audio Intelligence will prove popular, but it suggests that competitors may add similar features before long, now that a major manufacturer has shown they can be built into a smartwatch. By comparison, Samsung has focused its latest wearables on health and fitness measurements, with new metrics such as Vascular Load and Daily Cardio Load on the Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2. The difference shows two approaches to wearables, with Apple adding AI-based audio tools that interpret conversations and Samsung adding more detailed body data. Apple has not said when the Audio Intelligence features will reach the public version of watchOS 27, so users will have to wait for the final release to see whether the company changes anything in response to the concerns.
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