Apple's new Watch listens all day, and says it never records anything
Series 12 and Ultra 4 add features that replay the last 15 seconds of a conversation and summarise your day. The hardware barely changed; what the microphone does has.
Apple has aimed its new smartwatches squarely at the emerging market for AI wearables, adding features that listen continuously to conversations and help the wearer recall them afterwards.
The Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 were announced on Wednesday at the company's Surprise and Shine event in Cupertino. Neither gets a major hardware redesign. The significant changes are in software, and specifically in what the watch does with its microphone.
Rewinding the last 15 seconds
The group of features Apple calls Audio Intelligence is the headline.
Live Rewind lets a wearer go back up to 15 seconds. A double press of the Digital Crown surfaces the preceding fragment of conversation as a text snippet, which can then be queried through Siri or saved to the new Siri app to revisit later.
A second feature, Siri Recap, uses ambient listening to take high-level notes through the day. Apple's own examples are takeaways from a team meeting or a parent-teacher conference. When it is switched on, Apple Intelligence generates a title and key points in the Siri app after a conversation ends.
Apple states that these features do not create or store audio recordings.
That claim is the one most likely to be examined, because the watch must be listening continuously for either feature to function. Apple's position is that processing happens without a recording being retained; it has not published the technical detail behind that.
A separate Sound Recognition feature listens for sirens, alarms, doorbells and a baby crying, aimed at wearers who are deaf or hard of hearing — a use of the same always-on microphone with a considerably less contested purpose.
The sensor changes underneath
Both models get a rebuilt health-sensing system.
The electrode surface area has been increased for better skin contact during ECG readings. For optical sensing, the photodiodes have been rearranged into a ring to capture light more efficiently, and there are more power-efficient green LEDs intended to keep heart-rate measurement accurate through the day, including during movement.
The practical consequence is frequency. Background heart rate readings are now taken every five seconds throughout the day, which Apple says is sixty times more often than before.
Borrowing from smart rings
Two additions come from territory currently held by Oura and its competitors.
A readiness score analyses recent activity, vitals and sleep each morning and reduces them to a single number indicating how prepared the body is for the day. A Health Age feature compares key metrics — including VO2 max and sleep — against the wearer's actual age.
Both are established features in the smart ring category, and their arrival on the Watch is a fairly direct answer to it.
Price
The Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399. The Apple Watch Ultra 4 costs $499.
Indian pricing was not given at the launch event.