One thing that’s important to keep in mind when thinking about the sound and listening features of the new Apple Watch is the S11 chip. It’s designed with what Apple calls “secure exclave,” where the raw audio coming from the watch’s microphone is processed. This is where the sound is transcribed and processed, and only the results of this interpretation leave the exclave. It won’t store any received audio, Apple claims.
With this, there are four sound-related updates. The first is the simplest: improvements to Shazam on your watch. Right now, if you want to bring up Shazam to identify a song playing around you, you can scroll through your watch’s smart stack and swipe past or land on the Shazam widget. Then you press it and wait for the system to listen and guess the melody. On the Series 12, because it has a buffer of the previous 15 seconds of audio information, it can already start searching for the song once you scroll through the Shazam widget. This means it can potentially recognize music much faster.
Next comes the sound recognition tool which has long been an accessibility feature of iPhones. This uses the microphones on your iPhone, for example, to alert people to important sounds like alarms, sirens, babies crying or breaking glass. The Series 12 will be able to deliver alerts on these sounds even if a companion iPhone is not nearby. For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, this could be a useful extension.
Among the most interesting updates are the Live Rewind and Siri Recap features. Live Rewind can essentially provide a transcript of the last 15 seconds of what someone close to you might have said at any given time. Simply double-click the face of your Apple Watch Series 12 and a screen appears, while the microphone indicator appears in the upper right corner to indicate that it’s extracting audio. In my demo, I saw all of these clues followed by on-screen text that certainly seemed to accurately transcribe what the Apple rep had said seconds earlier.
I don’t really have time right now to break down all my thoughts, concerns, and understanding of how this works. The takeaway is that the Apple Watch doesn’t technically record audio but rather produces a continuous audio buffer that constantly overwrites into its Secure Excluve. It is then transcribed at the Secure Exclave level, and everything else it produces is based on that transcription, meaning the effectiveness of these features has a lot to do with the quality of the models behind this process. Additionally, transcription only begins when the button is pressed twice, so transcription is not always performed.
Finally, Siri Recap creates “high-level” summaries of events, rather than a full transcript. This is something you would more actively configure to listen to your surroundings on a schedule or manually every time you’re in a meeting, for example. I haven’t been able to test this, but I have seen the summaries in a companion iPhone’s Siri app, under the new Summaries tab. Apple specifically says that Recap transfers audio from your watch’s exclave to the iPhone’s exclave in its 11-page privacy overview, although it notes that the encrypted file will be “inaccessible to operating systems, applications, the user, or Apple.”
The last thing I want to point out for now is that I am in love with the ceramic variant of the Series 12. It was smooth and, unsurprisingly, almost like porcelain. I haven’t spent enough time with it to know if it will be sturdy over time, but I really liked the way it looked.
I’m sure I’ll learn more about the Apple Watch Series 12’s new features when I test out a review unit, but for now I’m sure we can agree that there have been many more updates than can be quickly covered in a relatively brief article. I’m intrigued by the audio intelligence features, how they perform in the real world, and how they impact performance and battery life. Stay tuned, because I’ll talk more about it in my full review.
