Apple is trying to get consumers to accept, and even welcome, a new reality: Your tech is always listening.
At Wednesday’s “Surprise and Shine” iPhone event, where the company introduced its new hardware lineup, the real surprise turned out not to be the foldable iPhone, but how the famously privacy-sensitive tech giant has decided its watches will now be able to process live audio and transcribe what was said.
Does this mean you’re always being recorded if the person you’re interacting with is wearing an Apple Watch? Not exactly — though it may make some people uncomfortable regardless.
It also raises the question of whether consumers actually want this technology, or if Apple forged ahead in this area because it was afraid that another company, such as OpenAI, would soon introduce a competitive AI device of its own.
Today, a number of startups are acting on the belief that AI-powered transcription is a key consumer use case for AI. So far, this more often involves transcribing meeting notes or recording lectures or interviews. Some companies, like the AI pendant Friend and Amazon’s Bee, ventured into other areas, too, with always-available AI companions that can help you remember your day by passively taking notes.
Apple decided to go a slightly different route. With its new watches’ “audio intelligence,” “Live Rewind,” and “Siri Recap” features, the company is straddling the line between accessibility and utility on one side, and what starts to feel like invasive technology on the other.
On its own, Audio Intelligence seems to be a useful feature for the deaf or hard of hearing, as it can alert Apple Watch owners to sounds like sirens, alarms, doorbells, babies crying, and more, using on-device AI. This can work even when the wearer’s iPhone is not with them and, in some cases, could provide life-saving assistance, such as when a fire alarm or carbon monoxide detector goes off. It’s doubtful anyone would take issue with this type of audio AI.
However, Live Rewind and Siri Recap move out of the assistive tech space and into a murkier area.
While Apple’s data protections may make these features more palatable to some, there’s still the possibility that normalizing listening technology may not be the best move for a privacy-conscious company. This is especially true given the broader consumer backlash against surveillance technology like Flock cameras, AI data centers, and AI apps in general.
For starters, the Live Rewind AI feature lets you go back in time 15 seconds and transcribe what was just said by double-pressing the watch’s digital crown. This transcription can then be saved to Apple’s new standalone Siri app so you can revisit the information later.
Apple suggests that this could be used to remember things like a “book recommendation, a colleague’s brilliant idea, or something you didn’t hear the first time,” but it also means that you can essentially catch anyone saying something they didn’t necessarily mean to have recorded and make a note of it.
This has implications around consent, not only from an ethical standpoint but from a legal one as well. AI device-maker Plaud, for instance, advises customers to obtain legally required consent before recording. Amazon’s Bee‘s terms of service remind users that they’re solely responsible for complying with the law around minors’ data privacy, not Amazon.
Since Apple isn’t saving audio, it’s unclear how the court system might handle these new, text-only transcripts. It’s possible the notes could be introduced as evidence in court, but their lack of audio could make them harder to authenticate or verify. Plus, the evidentiary rules around their use will also likely vary by state.
Beyond the legal issues, the idea that someone can always record from their watch has cultural implications.
Already, recording devices have impacted the way people behave in real life, studies have shown, as has social media and data surveillance culture. Knowing you could be recorded at any time has a dampening effect on how you interact with others and engage in self-expression.
However, recording a photo or video still requires a fairly obvious move on the recorder’s part: you have to hold up your phone and face it toward the action. Snapping up a bit of audio to turn into a transcript just by pressing the watch’s digital crown is arguably a much subtler gesture, even though it comes with an audible chime and full-screen animation of a microphone, as Apple says.
Another new Apple Watch feature, “Siri Recap,” uses ambient listening to “take high-level notes” of your conversations, which can be reviewed in the Siri iOS app. These notes will automatically generate a title, summary, and key points based on what was recorded and summarized by AI. They will not be exact transcripts.
Apple suggests this could make sense for recording meeting takeaways or key info from a parent-teacher conference, for instance.
The company also tried to assure users that it has approached these listening features with respect for user privacy.
Apple notes that Siri Recap doesn’t default to always being on like some other AI wearables are. Instead, you can choose when it’s enabled, like only at work or only during the day. Plus, you can turn the feature off and on at any time from Control Center.
Notably, Apple points out that it does not create or store audio recordings, and that the raw audio isn’t accessible, even to Apple. It also doesn’t identify or attribute the speakers, and it protects the generated transcripts and recaps with end-to-end encryption.
Whether that’s enough for consumers not to feel like the feature is creepy is another matter. Either Apple has found the right balance between utility and privacy, or it’s about to see some consumer backlash.
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