Apple Watch Audio Intelligence: 4 New Features Available On The Series 12 And Ultra 4

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Apple recently unveiled its two newest smartwatches, the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. Both have some solid upgrades under the hood, including new features powered by Apple’s Audio Intelligence, which brings AI-powered audio features to your wrist. While many of these features focus on making your life easier, like letting you recap the last 15 seconds of a conversation with Live Rewind, others help you find music more easily so you always know what that catchy song playing in the restaurant at dinner was.

When the new Apple smartwatches launch in September alongside the new iPhone 18 lineup, you’ll be able to make use of a few of the new features right off the bat. However, two of the biggest features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap, won’t be available until they hit beta later this year. That’s pretty standard for Apple’s big AI features, though, as the company has been slowly rolling out its AI functions over the past few years since it introduced Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.

One of the biggest new additions to the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 is an AI-assisted feature called Sound Recognition. Apple says the feature will let your watch notify you of important sounds you might miss, like sirens, alarms, doorbells, and more. The watch will register the sound, then notify you by vibrating and sending a pop-up to your watch display. 

This sounds like a solid feature for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as those who might get lost in music or other loud activities when a package arrives or something goes off that you need to know about. We don’t have many details about the functionality yet, but we expect more as watchOS 27 and the Watch Series 12’s release date gets closer. If you already have Sound Recognition turned on with your iPhone, then it will automatically activate on your new Apple Watch. However, other users will need to opt in to use the feature.

Live Rewind is one of the more controversial additions to the feature list on the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, mostly because it will rely on your Apple Watch to always be listening to the environment around you. This feature is opt-in, and once it arrives on Series 12 later this year as part of the beta program, users can enable it and then double-click the Digital Crown to have the AI pull the last 15 seconds of audio it captured and transcribe it into text on the screen. Your watch will also play a chime, even when on silent, to let others know Live Rewind was activated.

This will be really handy for users who are hard of hearing or even those who might have trouble paying attention or hearing exactly what fast speakers are saying, as they will be able to easily look at what the watch captured audibly. Of course, there have been complaints about Audio Intelligence as a whole, along with concerns about its overall implications for general user privacy. However, it is also hard to argue with how this feature will help some users from an accessibility standpoint.

Shazam isn’t exactly a new feature. In fact, Shazam has been available on iPhone in some fashion for several years now, after Apple acquired Shazam in 2018. However, the newest iteration of the feature on smartwatches will arrive on Watch Ultra 4 and Series 12, giving users an even more streamlined way to check what music might be playing around them.

Previously, you had to activate a widget and then wait for Shazam to work to pull up what song was playing. This was fine, but if you just happened to think about it at the end of a song, you could always miss out on being able to identify it. Now, with Music Recognition, Shazam will always be listening and will automatically highlight the song name in the Smart Stack on your Apple Watch. Shazam’s new setup will also require opting in, like the other features included in Audio Intelligence. It should be available as soon as the Watch Series 12 is, as Apple has only noted delays for Siri Recap and Live Rewind.

The last big new feature making a splash on Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 is Siri Recap. This functionality is another part of Apple’s Siri remake, which is meant to make the assistant even stronger and more useful for users. Apple says Siri Recap will take ambient notes on your conversations throughout the day and then create a “high-level Apple Intelligence-generated” summary. This will let you revisit the day’s chats without having to completely recall it all yourself.

The company says Siri Recap will automatically delete after seven days if you choose not to save it to your device or iCloud. You’ll still need to turn on Siri Recap, though Apple notes you can easily schedule it to run at certain times, like if you know you’ll be in a work meeting at a specific time on Monday or something. You can also set it to run only at certain locations, which should give you more control over where it operates. Much like Live Rewind, this feature has also drawn some controversy so far, though the benefits may still outweigh the negatives for some.