Apple's new Watch Ultra 4 can listen in on your conversations and summarise them: Here's how it works

Dubai: Among everything Apple announced at Wednesday's event, one feature drew a reaction that had little to do with specs. The new Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Series 12 can listen to conversations happening around you and produce a summary of what was said.

It's part of Apple's broader push to turn Siri into something closer to a wrist-based digital assistant, and it arrives with two distinct capabilities that are worth separating.

Live Rewind and Siri Recap

Live Rewind transcribes the last 15 seconds of a conversation, useful for catching something you missed or half-heard, like a name mentioned in passing or a direction you weren't quite paying attention to.

Siri Recap goes further, producing a higher-level summary of a longer conversation, including quotes, so you can catch up on a discussion you stepped away from.

Both features are arriving as part of an AI overhaul to Siri, launching alongside iOS 27 on 14 September. Apple first previewed the underlying AI system to developers back in June.

What Apple says about privacy

Apple appears to have anticipated the obvious objection, and addressed it directly in its presentation.

According to the company, no audio recordings are retained, either on the device itself or on Apple's servers. The Recap feature is described as producing a text-based summary only, not a full transcript of everything said. Apple has also stated that conversations processed through Recap and Live Rewind are end-to-end encrypted.

Whether that satisfies the obvious concern, that your watch is listening to people who haven't agreed to be recorded, is a separate question from whether Apple is storing the audio. The feature still requires an always-listening device on your wrist, and the people you're talking to have no way of knowing it's active unless you tell them.

Apple's other releases from yesterday

The Watch features arrived alongside the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone Duo, and Apple's broader Siri relaunch, all part of the same "Surprise and Shine" keynote. The scale of the AI push across the entire product line suggests this isn't an isolated Watch gimmick but part of a coordinated shift in how Apple wants its devices to behave.

For anyone with an eligible Watch, both features become available when watchOS updates roll out alongside iOS 27 next week.