Apple explains what happens to conversations Siri Recap hears

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 have new audio intelligence features that include sound recognition, music recognition, live rewind, and Siri Recap. When these features are enabled, the new Apple Watches are always listening to what’s happening around the wearer.

With ‌Siri‌ Recap, Apple Watch listens to your conversations throughout the day and takes notes. It uses Apple Intelligence to continually generate summaries that Apple says are intended to “refresh your memory” about events so you can stay present in the moment.

Apple anticipated backlash against an always-listening wearable device. It therefore offers a detailed explanation of the privacy features that have been added.

• No speaker attribution – ‌Siri‌ Recap will not identify or attribute speakers. Names may be included if mentioned in conversation, but nothing is directly attributed to any specific person.
• Information omitted – ‌Siri‌ Recaps will omit potentially harmful content or sensitive data, which Apple says includes language that promotes self-harm or hate speech, financial data, government-assigned identifiers, authentication data, and certain personal identifiers.
• Warnings – Apple cautions that ‌Siri‌ summary summaries may be incomplete or inaccurate, and that filtering may not remove all sensitive information.
• No transcription – Apple says that ‌Siri‌ Recap does not produce a full transcript of a conversation. It is simply a summary, similar to notes one might take after a conversation.
• Condensed conversations – Encrypted and condensed text versions of a conversation are sent to Private Cloud Compute. The text is less than half the length of the original transcript and brings the conversation back to its main meaning. Conversational tone, non-essential language, filler words and redundancies are removed.
• No audio recording – Audio is sent to Secure Excluve on Apple Watch and iPhone for processing and analysis. It is not accessed by the operating system, applications, user, or Apple, and no audio is recorded or stored.
• Private cloud computing – ‌Siri‌ Recap uses Apple Foundation models running on Private Cloud Compute to summarize and format the final result. The data is not accessible to Apple or anyone else.
• Subscribe, not unsubscribe – ‌Siri‌ Recap can be activated in the Apple Watch app on iPhone and configured for listening on a schedule. You can use it only at work or set it to never listen to it at night. There will be a quick access toggle in Control Center to turn it on and off.
• Automatic deletion – Summaries are automatically deleted after seven days if they are not saved in the ‌Siri‌ app.
• Siri app – Summaries are saved in the ‌Siri‌ app and can be deleted at any time from all synced devices. Saved summaries can be exported to other applications like Notes.
• Encryption – Summaries are end-to-end encrypted when synced to your other devices via iCloud so only your trusted devices can access them.

Apple suggests Apple Watch wearers “pay attention” to the people around them. “Although audio is not recorded and stored and no speaker is assigned, consider those around you whose conversations may be private or sensitive,” Apple’s document reads.

‌Siri‌ Recap requires one of the new Apple Watch models and an iPhone 16 or later (except iPhone 16e). The feature will launch later this year.