Apple recently revealed its two latest smartwatches, the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. Both have solid improvements under the hood, including new features powered by Apple’s Audio Intelligence, which brings AI-powered audio capabilities to your wrist. While many of these features aim to make your life easier, like letting you recap the last 15 seconds of a conversation with Live Rewind, others help you find music more easily so you always know what that catchy song was playing at the restaurant at dinner.
When the new Apple smartwatches launch in September alongside the new iPhone 18 range, you’ll be able to take advantage of some of the new features right off the bat. However, two of the most important features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap, won’t be available until their beta release later this year. This is pretty standard for Apple’s big AI features, though, as the company has slowly rolled out its AI features over the past few years since it introduced Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.
Sound recognition
One of the biggest new features in the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 is an AI-assisted feature called Sound Recognition. Apple says this feature will allow your watch to notify you of important sounds you might miss, like sirens, alarms, doorbells, and more. The watch will record the sound, then notify you by vibrating and sending a pop-up on your watch screen.
This seems like a solid feature for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as those who might get lost in music or other noisy activities when a package arrives or something happens that you need to be aware of. We don’t have many details on the feature yet, but we expect more as the release date for watchOS 27 and Watch Series 12 gets closer. If sound recognition is already activated on your iPhone, it will automatically activate on your new Apple Watch. However, other users will need to register to use this feature.
Live Rewind
Live Rewind is one of the more controversial additions to the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 feature list, mainly because it will rely on your Apple Watch to always listen to the environment around you. This feature is optional, and once it comes to the Series 12 later this year as part of the beta program, users can enable it, then double-click the Digital Crown to have the AI extract the last 15 seconds of captured audio and transcribe them into on-screen text. Your watch will also chime, even when in silent mode, to let others know that Live Rewind has been activated.
This will be very handy for hearing-impaired users or even those who might have trouble paying attention or hearing exactly what the fast speakers are saying, as they will easily be able to watch what the watch has captured audibly. Of course, there have been complaints about Audio Intelligence as a whole, as well as concerns about its overall implications on users’ general privacy. However, it’s also hard to argue with how this feature will help some users from an accessibility perspective.
Shazam
Shazam isn’t exactly a new feature. In fact, Shazam has been available on iPhone for several years now, following Apple’s acquisition of Shazam in 2018. However, the latest iteration of the feature on smartwatches will come to the Watch Ultra 4 and Series 12, giving users an even easier way to check what music might be playing around them.
Previously, you had to activate a widget and then wait for Shazam to work to display the currently playing song. It was good, but if you happened to think of it at the end of a song, you might still miss being able to identify it. Now, with music recognition, Shazam will always listen and automatically highlight the song name in your Apple Watch’s Smart Stack. The new Shazam setup will also require registration, like other features included in Audio Intelligence. It should be available as soon as the Watch Series 12 is, as Apple has only noted delays for Siri Recap and Live Rewind.
Siri Summary
The last big new thing that’s causing a stir on the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 is Siri Recap. This feature is another part of Apple’s Siri remake, which aims to make the assistant even more powerful and useful for users. Apple says Siri Recap will take ambient notes about your conversations throughout the day, then create a “high-level summary generated by Apple Intelligence.” This will allow you to review the day’s discussions without having to completely remember them yourself.
The company says Siri Recap will be automatically deleted after seven days if you choose not to save it to your device or iCloud. You’ll still need to enable Siri Recap, although Apple notes that you can easily schedule it to run at certain times, like if you know you’ll be in a work meeting at a specific time on Monday or something. You can also configure it to only run in certain locations, which should give you more control over where it operates. Much like Live Rewind, this feature has also caused some controversy so far, although the pros may still outweigh the cons for some.
