Apple Watch’s new feature listens to your chats and recaps them

At its Surprise and Shine event on Wednesday, Apple launched a meeting notetaker for the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, one of a series of new audio intelligence features that can listen to sounds through your Apple Watch.

The feature, called Siri Recap, uses ambient listening to take high-level notes of your conversations, according to the company. Apple Intelligence will automatically generate a title, summary, and key points from the conversation, which can then be reviewed in the Siri app.

Apple said that you can choose to keep this feature always on, set up a schedule, or turn off completely.

The notetaker wasn’t the only audio-focused feature introduced for the Watch during the event. Apple’s new audio intelligence features also include Shazam, which can identify songs instantly. This means Apple has finally caught up to Google’s Now Playing feature. The Watch can recognize loud sounds like sirens, alarms, doorbells, or a baby crying and notify users.

Apple also introduced a feature called Live Rewind, which lets users recap 15 seconds of conversation when they double-press the Digital Crown.

Apple emphasized that the features don’t store recordings and that raw audio is inaccessible. The Siri Recap feature doesn’t identify speakers either. Users can access Live Rewind recaps, which are end-to-end encrypted. Despite these guardrails, an always-listening feature will likely raise privacy concerns because Siri Recap may still capture sensitive information in its summaries.

Besides some of the privacy features, Siri Recap sounds similar to other notetakers like Granola and Circleback, which also have Apple Watch apps.