THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Live Rewind shows the last 15 seconds of nearby speech as text after a double press of the Digital Crown; Siri Recap turns conversations into short summaries.
  • Both are opt-in, start in English with the iOS 27.3 developer beta, and need an Apple Watch Series 12 or Ultra 4 paired with an iPhone 16 or later.
  • Apple says raw audio is not stored, speakers are not identified, and recaps are generated through Private Cloud Compute and deleted after seven days unless saved.

Two of the conversation features Apple showed at its September hardware event are now in testing. Live Rewind and Siri Recap, part of what Apple calls Audio Intelligence on the Apple Watch, are available to developers through the iOS 27.3 beta, TechCrunch and Digital Trends report. A public beta is expected before a general release; Digital Trends suggests it could arrive around mid-December, though Apple has not confirmed a date.

What the two features do

Live Rewind is meant for the moment you miss what someone just said. A double press of the Digital Crown displays the last 15 seconds of speech as text on the watch, accompanied by a chime and an on-screen indicator. The snippet can be dismissed, saved to the Siri app, or used as the basis for a follow-up question to Siri. Unsaved snippets vanish about 30 seconds after the screen dims.

Siri Recap condenses conversations into a one-line summary with bullet points for details such as dates, deadlines and prices. It is not a transcript and does not say who said what. Users are prompted to review recaps in the evening and the next morning, can save them to Notes or Journal, and can schedule the feature, for example to run only during working hours, or switch it off from Control Center. Recaps that are not saved are deleted after seven days.

Both features are opt-in and require an Apple Watch Series 12 or Ultra 4 paired with an iPhone 16 or later that supports Apple Intelligence. Apple's support page says they launch in English, are not offered to users under 13, and need a parent's approval for teenagers on child accounts. It also states that Siri AI will not initially be available in the EU.

How Apple handles the audio

According to Apple, small models on the watch's S11 chip detect when the wearer is in a conversation, and raw audio is processed in a protected area of the chip, then discarded rather than recorded. For Siri Recap, the iPhone turns speech into condensed text, which is encrypted and sent to Private Cloud Compute to produce the summary; Apple says that data is deleted from its servers immediately afterward. Saved items sync with end-to-end encryption.

Apple also says recaps try to leave out sensitive data such as government ID and financial details, while acknowledging the filter may miss some. Still, the people talking to the wearer are part of what gets summarized, a social question the beta will start to test.