Apple Watch's new AI features are normalizing the idea that technology is always listening | TechCrunch
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Apple says its new watches won’t save raw audio, but features that can transcribe recent speech and summarize ambient conversations raise new questions about consent, privacy, and how people behave when they know they could always be recorded.

With its new watches’ “Audio Intelligence,” “Live Rewind,” and “Siri Recap” features, the company is straddling the line between accessibility and utility on one side and what starts to feel like invasive technology on the other.

“Siri Recap,” uses ambient listening to “take high-level notes” of your conversations, which can be reviewed in the Siri iOS app. These notes will automatically generate a title, summary, and key points based on what was recorded and summarized by AI.

  • paraphrandEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Yeah. It reminds me of first hearing podcasters muse about AR glasses back in, like, 2005. They talked about never forgetting people’s names at parties and events in particular. But they never talked about the privacy implications and the data involved.

    These same podcasters mused about online advertising being better because the ads will be tailored to you, so you’ll never see terrible ads anymore. That was also idealistic narrow view nonsense.

    The podcast was This Week in Tech, and related shows btw.