Your Apple Watch has 2 new controversial listening features – but you have to opt in

ZDNET’s key takeaways

- Siri Recap and Live Rewind are now available to try in beta.

- Siri Recap summarizes your conversations into notes.

- Live Rewind transcribes the last 15 seconds.

Siri Recap and Live Rewind, Apple’s two controversial, always-listening Audio Intelligence features, are now available on the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 with the iOS 27.3 developer beta. Both features are opt-in.

Apple unveiled Siri Recap and Live Rewind in September alongside its Series 12 and Ultra 4 smartwatches, but it waited to release the features until after the smartwatches launched. Siri Recap provides a high-level summary of meetings, while Live Rewind continuously records audio so the watch wearer can pull up a transcript of the last 15 seconds.

Also: Apple’s Audio Intelligence is priming us for its real AI wearable future

More from ZDNET

How Siri Recap takes conversation notes on Apple Watch

1. Look for Siri Recaps in the Siri app

Within the Siri app, users will find a new section called “Recaps,” where both the Siri Recaps and Live Rewinds live.

Also: Apple Watch 12 can listen in and recap your conversations now – genius or privacy nightmare?

Siri Recap isn’t listening for nitty-gritty details within a meeting or recording a transcript’s worth of text. It’s more geared toward a conversation’s key takeaways, like important dates, times, prices, and action items. A demo of the feature showed an off-the-cuff conversation between a parent and a child discussing college application strategies. Siri Recap took notes on the high school activities the student could pursue to include in their application, the topics they could write about in their essay, and the colleges they could consider applying to.

2. Save Siri Recaps, export, or delete

After a conversation, a user can save the meeting notes in the Siri app or export them to Notes or Journal. If they don’t save the conversation, it’s automatically deleted after seven days.

Apple designed the feature to exclude certain information from the Siri Recap. It includes a person’s name only if they introduce themselves or if their name is regularly brought up in conversation. Otherwise, it avoids identifying speakers. It also scrubs the audio of language that promotes self-harm, financial and authentication data, and personal identifiers.

3. Enable or disable Siri Recaps at any time

You can enable or disable Recaps at any time through Control Center. You can create something akin to a Focus mode to automatically enable the feature once your Apple Watch detects you’ve reached your office or college lecture. Each morning, Siri Recap sends a notification to alert you that the feature is on. At the end of each day, you get a reminder to check your daily recaps in the Siri app.

The feature constantly assesses whether a conversation is relevant, optimizing its detection based on the conversation’s context, proximity, and length. It pauses summarization when a user is on a phone or FaceTime call, plays music, or uses earbuds. It won’t work when Bluetooth devices like AirPods are in use.

How Live Rewind records 15-second transcripts on Apple Watch

1. Double-press the Digital Crown

Double-press the Digital Crown to see a transcript of the past 15 seconds of conversation. The Apple Watch chimes and displays an animation to indicate it’s in use, then shows the transcript for 30 seconds.

Also: Is cellular on Apple Watch worth it? 4 ways people use it – and why I opt out

Live Rewind is built for those head-in-the-clouds moments when you miss a tidbit of information and can’t go back and ask what a speaker said. I think about how useful this could be in a college lecture or boardroom setting, where dozens of people’s conversations and questions prevent someone from asking a clarifying question about what was discussed.

2. Share the Live Rewind snippet with Siri

The user can send the snippet to the Siri app to save it or ask about it (if they want to look up the definition of a mentioned term or get more information on the history of a mentioned topic, for example). If the user doesn’t act on it, the snippet is deleted. Any snippet you save is encrypted through iCloud. The audio buffer updates continuously, and unused audio is automatically deleted. It’s processed on the device and not sent to Apple.

How Apple Watch protects your audio

To some, an always-on, always-listening smartwatch can sound like a privacy breach waiting to happen. That’s a fair concern, and Apple has taken steps to address privacy and security concerns with its Secure Exclave.

The Secure Exclave explained

Think of the Secure Exclave as a private island on the S11 chip where the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 process audio. A secure audio buffer processes the raw audio, and a secure pairing mechanism privately enables the connection between a paired Apple Watch and iPhone.

Also: The Apple Watch Ultra 4 just hit its lowest price ever ahead of Black Friday

For Siri Recap, the S11 chip listens to detect whether the watch wearer is part of a current conversation. Once detected, audio enters the Secure Exclave, where it’s encrypted and sent to the Secure Exclave on the iPhone. The iPhone turns that audio into condensed text, essentially editing the conversation to remove filler words or irrelevant information, and then it’s sent to private cloud compute. Private cloud compute creates a recap, delivered to your iPhone’s Siri app.

This process ensures that no one, including Apple, can access the audio data.

How to turn off Siri Recap and Live Rewind on Apple Watch

Don’t want your Apple Watch to listen to you? Siri Recap and Live Rewind are off by default, according to Apple.

If your Apple Watch prompts you to enable Audio Intelligence during setup, you can choose which features to turn on.

On its support page, Apple said you can “turn on Siri Recap in the Watch app on iPhone.” Once it’s enabled, you can “turn it on or off at any time from Control Center.” To enable Live Rewind, Apple said to “open the Watch app, tap Siri, then tap Live Rewind and turn on ‘Double Click Digital Crown.’”

I haven’t tested these controls myself. I’d expect you can follow the same steps to switch Live Rewind off, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.