Siri’s not content to remain on your phone all day and only stir when you have some inane request. At Wednesday’s big “Surprise and Shine” event, Apple said it wants its AI to be an active participant in your life through its new Apple Watch Series 12, an ear on your wrist that will give you a rundown of your day and even your conversations.
The new feature is called “Siri Recap,” and it’s using Apple’s Siri and the supposed privacy of its Private Cloud Compute servers to offer you a summary of your day, including what you talked about during that work meeting you tuned out of five minutes in. This feature may not offer a transcript or store your audio, but it will offer a generalized look at what you did all day.
There are several other “Audio Intelligence” features. With a double press of the digital crown, you can quickly enable “Live Rewind” to get a summary of what somebody just said to you. It’s useful perhaps if you tend to space out during important conversations or meetings. Apple Watches will also be able to comprehend different sounds, like a doorbell going off. Some of these features, like Siri Recap and Live Rewind, will only be available in beta this fall.
Apple also says it has a more efficient and accurate “Health Sensing System” with higher-frequency heart rate readings every five seconds. These sensors now also sense heart rate variability every four seconds. It’s obvious that Apple imagines its Apple Watch as the king of health wearables. HRV sensing is now available in the Vitals app.
That feeds into Apple’s new concept for Apple Watch as an all-around assistant for your activities and health. A new readiness feature takes in health data separate from the Fitness app—with constant heart rate tracking—and uses it for wellness tracking. This readiness score updates throughout the day based on your sleep and other health metrics.
Apple also detailed updates to its Health app that should combine with the watch for more detailed, Whoop-like health insights with a generated summary of your health insights. There’s another longevity tab inside the Health app with a large chart that shows how you may be performing as you age, and then it judges you for whether your system is running better or worse than your actual years on Earth. The updated Health app is coming “later this year.”
Apple’s new wearables aren’t all that different from the Apple Watch Series 11. For those who miss the ceramic case option on the regular Apple Watch, that’s back, too. Each watch is making use of the new S11 SiP (system in package). The new chip is derived from the A20 Pro iPhone chip based on two efficiency (E) cores. It also features a larger neural engine in order to process all this data.
Both the Apple Watch Series 12 and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 will be available for pre-order starting today for $399.
This story is developing…
