Apple Doesn’t Want You to Worry About the New Apple Watch's Listening Features
Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 add opt-in audio intelligence features that process microphone audio on-device via a new Secure Exclave.
The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 ship with four opt-in audio intelligence features: Sound Recognition, Shazam music identification, Siri Recap conversation summaries, and Live Rewind 15-second transcription. Audio is held and processed in an isolated Secure Exclave buffer on the new S11 chips, with on-device speech recognition on iPhone producing a distilled transcript that foundation models in Private Cloud Compute then summarize. Apple says no raw audio is stored or accessible to the operating system, apps, the user, or Apple, and untransferred audio is automatically deleted.
- Four opt-in features: Sound Recognition, Shazam, Siri Recap, Live Rewind
- S11 chips add Secure Exclave, isolated memory for sensor audio
- Raw audio is deleted immediately and never accessible to OS or apps
- Summaries run in Private Cloud Compute after on-device distillation
- A chime alerts bystanders when Live Rewind transcription activates
- Vendors
- Apple
- Organizations
- Apple
- AI models
- Private Cloud Compute
From the original article
5 min read at wired.com
The new Apple Watch includes several “intelligent” listening features that have privacy and security baked in. But the protections can’t change the facts of what the tools do.
By Lily Hay Newman · wired.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.