Live Rewind makes me want to buy an Apple Watch

I have never owned an Apple Watch. And apart from trying a watch on here and there for demo purposes, I’ve never really worn an Apple Watch, not for an extended period anyhow. And up until the Apple Watch Series 12’s unveiling earlier this year, I expected that to remain the case for years to come. This is no knock specifically on the Apple Watch, incidentally. I could say the same thing for a Galaxy Watch, a Pixel Watch, even just a regular old wristwatch. I don’t like wearing things on my wrist. Even if you slap one of those ID bands you sometimes wear at concerts or other public venues on me, I’ll spend half my time mindlessly pawing at my arm, trying to shake off whatever’s on my wrist. How committed am I to the No Wristwatches Ever bit? For much of my life, I carried around a pocket watch, and it was only partially because I was adopting an affectation. Once the iPhone came along, providing a slightly more advanced clock to carry around in my pocket, the pocket watch went back into the dresser drawer for good. So why is the Apple Watch Series 12 finally the device that’s going to break this anti-watch stance I’ve adopted? Well, I may not like wearing things on my wrist, but I dislike not being able to hear things even more. And the Audio Intelligence features on the latest Apple smartwatches seem like a promising solution for problems caused by my dodgy hearing. Speak up, sonny As a gentleman whose odometer passed the half-century mark a few years back, I’m in relatively good shape in most areas. Unfortunately, those areas do not include my hearing, which has been in steady decline since my 20s. Things aren’t so bad that I need a hearing aid to go about my business, but depending on the setting, making heads or tails out of what someone is saying can prove challenging. When my wife tries to tell me something from an adjoining room, there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll have no idea what she’s talking about. If you’re speaking while facing away from me, you might as well be in a cone of silence. And in noisy settings — a crowded restaurant, a busy commuter train or heaven forfend a concert — I’m going to do a lot of nodding politely and smiling to cover for the fact that I haven’t heard a word anybody’s said. It’s not the worst affliction to have in the world. There’s an out-of-kilter signal-to-noise ratio out there in the world, and not being able to hear a lot of it filters out much of the latter. But yes, there are times I need to hear what’s being said to me and plaintively asking “Would you mind repeating that?” only helps so much. That’s where the Apple Watch Series 12 and its Live Rewind feature come into play. Live Rewind to the rescue Announced by Apple at its September product event, Live Rewind is a feature coming via the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 that provides a transcript of anything that someone has said to you in the last 15 seconds. You activate the feature by double-pressing the Digital Crown on your watch; you also have to enable the feature in the Watch app by selecting Siri and tapping Live Rewind followed by turning on the Double Click Digital Crown Setting. With an Apple Watch 12 on my wrist — the Ultra’s too fancy for the likes of me — I can glance at the display when I didn’t quite make out all the details of what someone just told me. Didn’t quite catch what the nurse at my mom’s care facility just said? Missed the particulars of some instructions my wife gave me as she was heading out the door? Did the bartender rattle off the beers on tap just a bit too quickly? Now the Apple Watch and Live Rewind hold the answers to life’s mysteries. Live Rewind, which is part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, is just one of the Audio Intelligence features that take advantage of the built-in microphone and S11 chip found on Apple’s latest watches. Siri Recap, also part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, can provide you with AI-generated summaries of conversations you’ve had during the day. Sound Recognition and Music Recognition are already part of watchOS 27 — the former notifies you when it detects alarms, doorbells and sirens while the latter is essentially Shazam on your wrist. All four features are a boon to those of us who don’t hear as well as we used to. Concerns worth listening to Naturally, the idea that the latest Apple Watches are always listening and taking notes is going to raise some concerns — legitimate ones, too. The people whose conversations get summarized by Siri Recap or whose words are being repeated back to you via Live Rewind didn’t consent to any of this, so a very strong argument could be made that these features are crowding in on people’s privacy. Apple’s response — both in an Audio Intelligence support document and a white paper on privacy that goes into even greater detail — essentially boils down to the fact that nothing’s being recorded or stored. Instead, the audio is routed through a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, where it can’t be accessed by anything else, including Apple. Live Rewind and Sound Recognition do all their processing on device. Siri Recap is sending detected summaries of transcribed audio off-device, but it’s doing that through Private Cloud Compute to maintain privacy. And what you’re getting back isn’t a word-for-word transcript but more of a summary meant to refresh your memory. That’s all well and good for you and your privacy, but what about the people around you? Live Rewind plays a chime when it’s activated to cut down on the chance of surreptitious listening. Apple also says the feature is supposed to focus on conversations you’re involved in, not eavesdrop on ones taking place around you. And there’s no speaker identification or attribution, though if names come up in a conversation, they’ll be reflected in the summary. Most of those explanations work for me, to the point where I’d be comfortable that Live Rewind isn’t infringing on people’s privacy. Still, I recognize that technology designed for benign uses can be exploited by bad actors, so that’s something Apple — and Apple Watch owners — are going to have to remain vigilant about. Watch and listen Of course, all this Apple Watch talk ignores that there’s an alternative out there for those of us with hearing issues — a pair of AirPods Pro earbuds can double as a hearing aid, at least if you’ve got the second or third generation on hand. A Live Listen feature turns your iPhone into a microphone to help you better hear conversations, and it works with a wider variety of AirPods, too. I’m not quite sure that’s the best solution for my particular needs. For starters, I’d have to upgrade to the AirPods Pro 3, and while that $249 outlay is cheaper than an Apple Watch Series 12, it’s not that much cheaper when you factor in the other capabilities a smartwatch offers. Plus, the hearing aid feature would require me to wear AirPods more consistently, something that strikes me as awkward when I’m out on a social call. Say what you will about wearing something on your wrist — and I’ve said plenty — but at least it feels more natural than keeping your AirPods on during a fancy dinner. So am I ready to run out and get an Apple Watch now that it has a feature I find truly useful? Not quite — but I’m closer to getting a smartwatch than I ever have been, and Live Rewind certainly is helping me get there. And that’s kind of how technology works. We don’t buy gadgets and gizmos just to own the latest thing — we buy them because they solve a need in our lives. For a lot of people, the Apple Watch became a more attractive option as Apple built out the health and fitness tracking features that made this device more than just a wrist-sized version of the iPhone. Those users wanted a better picture of their health, and Apple managed to produce something that provided exactly that. Up until now, I could take or leave those health-monitoring capabilities. But a device that helps me understand what people are saying to me in a noisy room, that’s a watch feature whose time has finally come. [Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.] If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.