The New Apple Watch “Siri Browse” Feature Turned Out to Be Even Creepier Than I Expected.
The “Siri Recap” feature, announced by Apple in September, is finally available in developer beta , and I’ve spent the last 24 hours with it enabled. It’s even more disturbing than the “Live Rewind” feature that launched simultaneously. It listens to all my conversations and produces summaries that are both helpful and utterly terrifying.
There’s a button in the Watch Control Center that lets you turn off the event summary feature, but if I forget to do so, Siri will listen to everything . I’ll get a brief summary of the entire evening, presented in roughly hour-long chunks, including things I’d otherwise completely forget I’d heard.
The summaries make stern mentions of silly memes my kids laughed at, and highlights from short conversations are presented as bullet points. If the conversation is focused on a single topic, I often get a pretty good summary, highlighting specific facts and figures; but just as often, Siri gets confused and mixes up several topics or completely misheard a name or phrase.
What are Siri Recaps and how do they fit into the audio intelligence ecosystem?
Apple identifies four features it considers part of its “audio intelligence”:
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Music recognition , better known as Shazam, has long been available on the Apple Watch, although it has received some improvements and now recognizes music automatically.
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A sound recognition feature that can alert you to doorbells and baby cries. A version of this feature was launched in 2020 as a means of improving accessibility .
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The Live Rewind feature allows you to get a transcript of the last 15 seconds of detected speech on your wrist.
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Siri Recaps lets you summarize the content of entire conversations and read it back to you on your phone.
At Apple’s keynote, Live Rewind demonstrated the most impressive example: a waiter listed the restaurant’s current specials, and a customer wearing an Apple Watch glanced at their watch to see the specific dishes mentioned. The usefulness of this feature is obvious, but at the same time, it’s a bit redundant: why not simply ask the waiter to repeat the list while they’re standing nearby?
I haven’t used the Live Rewind feature, other than out of curiosity to see how it works. I’ve found that it’s poor at recognizing lyrics, and that by the time I remember what was just said in a conversation, more than 15 seconds have passed since the moment I wasn’t sure. So far, I haven’t found any reason to really use it.
And what about Siri Recaps? It’s both useful and alarming. I turned it on and decided to test it later. But once it was on, Siri dutifully listened as I picked up my son from school and told him about the health of a sick family member. We stopped at the library and chatted about all sorts of things along the way: vacation plans, library rules, and the possibility of humans living in space in the future. Siri listened to it all.
How to enable Siri’s Browse feature
At least for now, this feature is only available in the developer beta, so sign up now if you want to try it out. You’ll need an Apple Watch Series 12 (or Ultra 4) and an iPhone 16 or later, excluding the 16e. (I have an 16 Pro, so that’s fine for me.)
After updating to version 27.3, open the Watch app, tap Siri , and enable Siri Recap. You can set a schedule for when Siri should listen (for example, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM if you want it to work during the workday and turn it off in the evening). You’ll need to set a passcode on your watch, and you’ll be guided through updating the audio connection. In the Control Center on your watch, you’ll find a button you can use to toggle Siri Recap on and off. To read your recaps, open the Siri app on your phone.
What I Found in My Siri Reviews
As promised, the conversation summaries don’t identify the speakers. They don’t provide an exact transcript, and there’s no way to listen to the recording to verify exactly what was said. This is probably good for privacy and for the relationship; it’s impossible to prove that your spouse said exactly what they said. I can also tell people I don’t record them, and technically be right.
Still, I feel weird publishing the contents of these reviews because they contain things people told me, presumably in private. I had this feature enabled while I was attending a choir rehearsal, and Siri relayed the short conversations I had with other choir members before and after rehearsal. (Interestingly, it didn’t relay any of the quiet conversations I had with the other sopranos while the tenors were rehearsing their parts. I’m not sure if the watch couldn’t hear us over the music, or if Siri is programmed not to listen when music is playing.)
Because speakers aren’t identified by name, Siri seems unsure what to do when disagreements arise. A human notetaker would simply note that Person A was in favor of something and Person B was against it. But when my son and I disagreed about the likelihood of future space colonization, the summary didn’t reflect the different positions expressed. The conversation was summarized as “a discussion of the feasibility and timeline of human space colonization and asteroid mining,” which isn’t entirely accurate, but close enough.
Regarding the content of the discussion, the summary includes a point about “skepticism about permanent space colonies within the next 100 years.” My reasons for my skepticism were not stated, and my son’s opposing viewpoint was not mentioned at all. If I were to use this summary to refresh my memory of the conversation, it wouldn’t be very helpful.
Some details are glaringly inaccurate. After discussing a family member’s health, the summary included notes about the prognosis for “the father.” The family member we were discussing isn’t anyone’s father. Names in general seem to be a problem; I recommended a book to my son, and the summary notes the book’s contents but not its title. The book’s author is listed in the introduction to the summary (a sort of summary of the summary), but not in the summary itself, where the book is mentioned.
Siri’s quick overviews can be useful, but at what cost?
I should probably turn off Siri’s conversation transcription feature. It feels wrong to let people talk to me without letting them know their conversation is… well, not technically being recorded, but essentially being recorded.
But it’s tempting to leave it running so I can review the day’s notes later. Some details in the summaries are useful, like dates discussed as holiday party ideas. The summaries will be deleted after about a week (unless I save them in a notes app), so if I want to recall a conversation from a few days ago, I can scroll through my summaries and find it.
However, relying on summaries would be foolish. The most important points of a conversation are often omitted; Siri doesn’t know what’s truly important, and there’s no way to tell her what to pay attention to. As I mentioned, specific details may be incorrect. There’s also no way to control when a “conversation” starts or ends unless you toggle the summaries feature on your watch.
And that’s not all: names are usually omitted (wait, who did she recommend I contact about this project?), and the few mentions that do make it into the summary, like event names, are often incorrect. Topics of discussion are often jumbled in unhelpful ways: my husband mentioned paying for certain classes for one of our children, and later I talked to that child about an unrelated exam. The summary is all jumbled, and almost every detail is flawed. The only useful thing the summary could have done would be remind me that some AP US history class was discussed. Reading these summaries can be like reliving the day, only in the passive voice.