There’s no end to the tech industry’s desire to make everyday conversations something that are processed, analyzed, and stored by machines, and made available to, not the person these conversations are with, but the device owner.
Apple’s new features announced on September 9 for the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 are opt-in, but this means the person who owns the device has the option to allow their Apple Watch to store conversation summaries, while the person they’re speaking to has no say in the matter.
The features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap, will be arriving in beta later this year. Live Rewind is more of a “do-over,” allowing the wearer to see the last 15 seconds of conversation as text on the watch face, after they double-press the Digital Crown.
Siri Recap, on the other hand, makes brief summaries of conversations, that can be referenced later. Siri Recap “can be set to be on all the time,” alternatively, the wearer can schedule it or turn it off. Apple says the idea is to help people remember what was said in a conversation without taking notes.
Apple’s support page does its best to allay any privacy and security fears regarding the way the two features work. The company says that with Live Rewind, audio is processed locally on the watch, in the S11 chip’s hardware-isolated Secure Exclave, and deleted immediately after processing. The wearer’s paired iPhone is used for Siri Recap to transcribe and condense the conversation, before the encrypted, condensed text is sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute to be summarized, and then sent back to the watch.
Apple promises it cannot access the cloud data, and that the encrypted text is synced across the wearer’s devices via iCloud. The company also promises that the audio is not stored, and that Live Rewind does not continuously transcribe background conversations.
The page also notes that the summaries are “comparable to notes you might jot down after a conversation,” and that they are deleted after seven days unless saved or exported. Live Rewind snippets are deleted about 30 seconds after the display dims unless saved or sent to Ask Siri. The names of people mentioned in conversation may appear in the summaries, although the speakers are not attributed. Sensitive details are said to be filtered out, but Apple warns that this may not always work.
As for the wearer, they can save or export the conversation summaries, which means they can keep them beyond the seven-day limit. Apple also says that Live Rewind is announced by a chime (even when the watch is in silent mode), an animation, and a microphone indicator.
