Apple Explains What Happens to Conversations Siri Recap Hears

The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 now come equipped with new Audio Intelligence features, including Sound Recognition, Music Recognition, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap. These features enable the watches to continuously listen to the wearer's surroundings. Siri Recap is a specific feature that records conversations throughout the day and creates summaries. Apple claims the summaries are designed to help users remember events and stay present.

Apple recognized concerns about always-listening wearables and has included detailed privacy measures. The feature will not attribute speakers or identify any specific person mentioned in the conversation. Certain types of potentially harmful content or sensitive data will be omitted from the summaries. These include language promoting self-harm or hate speech, financial data, government identifiers, authentication data, and certain personal identifiers.

However, Apple cautions that Siri Recap summaries may be incomplete or inaccurate, and filtering may not remove all sensitive information. The summaries are condensed versions of conversations and do not include the full transcript. They remove tone, non-essential language, filler words, and redundancies. The condensed text versions are sent to Private Cloud Compute for processing. The audio itself is not recorded or stored; it is sent to the Secure Exclave on Apple Watch and iPhone for analysis.

To use Siri Recap, users can opt-in via the Apple Watch app on their iPhone. The feature can be scheduled to listen during specific times, such as at work or never at night. There will be a quick toggle for turning it on and off in Control Center. Summaries are auto-deleted after seven days if not saved to the Siri app. Users can also delete summaries at any time from all synced devices, or export them to other apps like Notes.

Summaries are end-to-end encrypted when synced via iCloud, ensuring only trusted devices can access them.

Siri Recap requires a new Apple Watch model and an iPhone 16 or later (except the iPhone 16e). The feature is set to launch later this year. Apple encourages users to be mindful of those around them, especially in private or sensitive situations, while using this feature.