Apple CEO John Ternus and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak recently discussed the privacy challenges surrounding AI-powered wearable devices. The conversation addressed public concerns regarding smart glasses and the company's approach to integrating artificial intelligence into its hardware products.
Ternus highlighted the Live Rewind feature on the Apple Watch Series 12 as an example of privacy-focused design. This function requires manual activation by the user via the Digital Crown, ensuring it does not record audio in the background. The device converts speech into text snippets, which can then be processed by Siri or saved within the application.
To ensure transparency for those nearby, the watch emits an audible alert when Live Rewind is active, even if the device is muted or connected to headphones. Additionally, the screen displays a full-screen animation and a microphone indicator to signal that recording is in progress to others in the vicinity.
The Apple Watch Series 12 also includes a Siri Recap feature designed to summarize daily conversations. Both executives emphasized that these AI tools do not identify or tag specific individuals. Furthermore, users cannot access raw audio recordings, and Apple maintains no access to the original audio files generated by these features.
