Apple’s latest watchOS beta includes its new always-on Audio Intelligence features

Starting today, Siri can tune into the Apple Watch’s mic with Audio Intelligence features that are available in the new watchOS 27.3 developer beta rolling out now. The two new additions are Siri Recap, which uses “ambient listening” to generate summaries of your conversation, and Live Rewind, which generates text transcripts of the last 15 seconds of audio your watch’s mic detected.

When it comes to the implications of an ambient, always-listening AI, Apple has released this Audio Intelligence
Privacy Overview (pdf) about how it plans to protect users’ privacy when their watch is listening around the clock. It goes into detail about Apple’s claims that users’ raw audio “is handled within dedicated hardware, is not saved as a file, and is not accessible to the operating system, apps, or Apple.” According to Apple, “If you use iCloud with two-factor authentication and have a device passcode, any Siri Recap summary or Live Rewind text snippet you choose to save syncs across your devices end-to-end encrypted in the Siri app.”