Audio Intelligence and privacy: Apple explains how the system that listens to us from the new Apple Watches works

The new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 arrive with Audio Intelligence to turn ambient sound into useful information. Live Rewind and Siri Recap rely on the new S11 chips and on Apple Intelligence to let the watch listen continuously when these features are enabled, but what about our privacy? Apple has detailed how it protects our privacy.

With Siri Recap, you’ll get a summary of the conversation

Siri Recap can take notes on our conversations and generate a summary with the title and key points. As reported by MacRumors, Apple processes the audio inside a hardware-isolated environment and the system itself deletes it after analyzing it. Then, a condensed version is sent to Private Cloud Compute, where Apple’s models prepare the final summary.

The privacy architecture of Apple Intelligence makes perfect sense here, because the audio is physically inaccessible to the operating system, apps, and Apple, while summaries synced to the Siri app via iCloud are end-to-end encrypted. Siri Recap must, of course, be explicitly enabled.

Live Rewind lets us retrieve the last 15 seconds of what we’ve heard

By double-pressing the Digital Crown, we can retrieve a text-only version of the last 15 seconds of a conversation. To prevent it from being activated secretly, Apple explains that the watch emits a sound, even when it’s in silent mode, and shows an animation next to the microphone indicator when this feature is activated.

The text, unless we decide to save it in the Siri app, disappears 30 seconds after you lower your wrist, while the audio never becomes available.

Audio Intelligence offers useful features with very specific privacy controls. Just as we ourselves could take notes during a conversation or jot down what was just said, the Apple Watch can do exactly that, and nothing more, for us. Privacy and functionality can indeed go hand in hand.