NY Daily Wire
Apple has launched new Watches with a feature that is aimed at allowing people to take notes on their entire lives. The new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 were launched this week , alongside the headline-grabbing iPhone Duo , with a range of new improvements. One of them is a set of new features that Apple calls “Audio Intelligence”, aimed at using the sensors in the watches and its AI tools to smartly interact with the world around their owner.
Some of those features are relatively straightforward in their usefulness, such as a tool that will listen out for potentially important noises like crying babies or smashing glass and alert their owners, or a constantly working version of Shazam that will let people quickly identify music that is playing around them. But others are a little more complex, and could lead to more controversy: a tool called “Live Rewind” and another called “Siri Recap”, both of which rely on constantly taking audio from the Watch’s microphones. Live Rewind means that the Watch is constantly saving audio, so that if you miss what someone said – the precise details of a menu delivered by a fast-speaking waiter, for instance, or a technical detail from a meeting – you can press on your Watch and see a transcription of the last 15 seconds of sound that it heard.
Siri Recap also works by constantly listening out for audio, then transcribes it and uses AI to summarise it, presenting high-level notes on the important conversations of a day so that they can be revisited or saved afterwards. “Siri Recap ambiently takes notes on your conversations throughout your day and creates high-level Apple Intelligence–generated summaries that you can use later to jog your memory, so you can stay present in the moment,” Apple’s website says. “Your summaries auto-delete after seven days if you choose not to save them.” For both features, Apple stressed that it had built them with privacy in mind, in keeping with the company’s long-held and strident belief in that principle.
That means that there are a host of technical and design protections built into the Audio Intelligence tools. The Live Rewind feature only stores 15 seconds of audio at any given time, and then it is permanently deleted if it is not used, for instance. If someone chooses to use it, then the Watch plays a loud tone that cannot be turned off, so that anyone around can know that what they have said might be seen on the display.
Similarly, the Siri Recap feature must be explicitly opted into, can be turned off at any time, and can be set to only switch on based on a schedule, such as when the Watch’s owner is at work. When it is switched on, all of the audio is kept private: it is stored in a special part of the Watch that nobody including Apple can access, then passed to a similarly secure part of the phone, and then analysed using Apple’s private and secure AI servers, meaning that no recordings are ever made and no precise transcriptions are stored. The recaps themselves are also done in a way that preserves people’s privacy, Apple said.
The notes that the tool provides are high-level and so do not reflect specific details, they will not attribute anything to specific people, and will leave out sensitive content such as harmful speech or details such as financial data. But the feature has already led to controversy nonetheless, given that it means that someone having a conversation with someone wearing a Watch with the feature turned on might be having that conversation written up in a summary without their knowledge. Support documents on Apple’s website appeared to indicate that it was aware that the feature could lead to some interpersonal complications, even as it stressed that both the listening and the transcriptions would remain private.
“Be mindful of those around you,” a document about the new Audio Intelligence features on Apple’s website stresses . “While audio is not recorded and stored, and no speakers are attributed, consider those around you where conversations might be private or sensitive.” Apple’s support documents also explicitly say that the Live Rewind and Siri Recap features will be available in “beta later this year”, suggesting that they could be subject to change before they are fully released to the public. The Audio Intelligence features come as Apple pitches the iPhone as an "intelligent personal hub" that is able to bring together information from other devices such as the Apple Watch .
New chief executive John Ternus began his first ever event as the head of the company with a broad pitch for the iPhone as a personal AI device that seemed to be aimed at other companies such as OpenAI who are looking to make their own artificially intelligent “iPhone killers”. Mr Ternus suggested in the keynote video that anyone looking to build such a device from scratch would probably end up with a product with sensors such as cameras and microphones to understand the outside world, a powerful processor to analyse that data, and a display to show the information that resulted; something, that is, remarkably like the iPhone. It appeared to be both a statement of intent for his vision of the iPhone in a world of AI features, as well as a message to those companies who are looking to supersede it with their own new products.
A number of startups have launched versions of pendants that are for example worn around the neck, capturing data and feeding it to AI so that it can be looked at later. Other major companies have been rumoured to be working on their own similar technologies – including OpenAI, with which Apple is currently locked in a legal dispute. All of those products aim to capture data from their owners’ lives so that it can be stored and then run through artificial intelligence systems, with the aim of helping people recover or find important information.
But as with all AI systems, they become more useful the more data that they are able to collect – and that need for data has already led to concerns that people could be recorded without their permission. The new Audio Intelligence features also come amid increased concern about how and whether people are able to consent to their data being gathered. Meta for instance has marketed its smart glasses partly as a way of using the built-in cameras to ask questions or gather information about the world – but they are best known for the criticism that they make it easier to record or photograph people without their consent .
Apple is rumoured to be working on its own similar products, such as AirPods with built-in cameras and eventually smart glasses of its own. The controversy over Meta’s smart glasses have already led to concerns at Apple about how it could introduce its own smart glasses while avoiding worries that they would infringe on people’s privacy, according to reports .
Source: The Independent
