Late-breaking reports suggest Apple has built a new Siri AI ‘Recaps’ feature that summarizes your day for you. The idea sounds great until you recognize that this summary will also include overheard conversations.
Suspending the huge red flag of concern over privacy and data protection for a moment or two, why would this be useful and who is it for?
How it’s supposed to work
First, it is being described as an Apple Watch feature that will only be available on the latest models: Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, as these allegedly include secure audio processing hardware. Reading between the lines, that suggests the devices will be able to listen to and process audio on device, which implies that the information won’t need to leave your smartwatch, not even to your iPhone.
The report also says the feature doesn’t make a transcript, nor does it store the audio; it instead gathers key datapoints from what is said to include in the summary, deleting all the remaining information in the process. You can have the feature working all day, on-demand, or only in specific locations. The idea seems to be to provide some kind of actionable summary of events and key conversations that take place during the day. I imagine the subtext is to digitize as much as possible of your daily existence as Apple thinks you will be comfortable with to create the kind of datapoints contextual AI requires if it is going to help with your life.
