Live Rewind Is a Creepy Part of Apple’s Audio Intelligence Suite

Apple held its annual September major product rollout today announcing, among other things, updated Apple Watch models with “Audio Intelligence” features. One of those features is “Live Rewind”: A double press of the Digital Crown shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet, so the user can catch something they may have missed or are less familiar with. Users can ask Siri about the content of the text or save it to the Siri app to revisit later. This feature is also coming to iPhone 16 and newer models. Apple swears up and down it is doing all it can to make this private and secure, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. The audio is apparently not actually saved and is, instead, merely transcribed by a dedicated coprocessor. That text is automatically deleted unless the user takes an action to save it, too. But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. Apple says they should be sufficiently…