The audio note taking feature is extremely off-putting to me and can't believe it was so prominently showcased.
It's made even worse by the fact that only the newest watches support this, but their external designs are unchanged from past ones, so there's no way to tell who's always listening to everything (I have an Ultra 2, likely my last one).
Is this something most people want?? At the very least I'd appreciate a notification like the unknown airtag thing to tell me I'm being eavesdropped.
The video demo is so strange. A waitress spoke too fast - just act like a normal person and politely ask them to repeat themselves, instead of reading a transcription on your watch. My goodness.
https://youtu.be/Pe2ugye7Ya4?si=qhGPselIm7sZkXyP&t=558 (
My father has hearing aids and in some environments, it doesn't work well (directional vs omnidirectional ... but directional requires the person to directly address him while omnidirectional tends to pick up too much background clutter). In doctors offices (for example) he has handed his phone in dictation mode to the receptionist and asked them to speak to it and then he reads the transcription and responds... and this repeats. In a restaurant environment, sometimes another person orders for him.
This sort of thing could be useful in such cases.
Has he tried these? https://www.fortell.com/
Or are they the directional ones you were referring to?
He has proper hearing aids - I'm not sure of the specific brand. They can be controlled via an app (and bluetooth). He's got a clip on microphone that goes directly to the hearing aids which sometimes goes on the table if he remembers to bring it so that we can talk to it and it does a better job... it's also used when he and my mother are out cycling and my mother wears it clipped to her shirt so that he can hear what she says.
One of the features that the app can control is the "environment". When out and about it's set to omnidirectional so that someone next to him doesn't need to be talking directly to him, however that picks up a lot of background and when in a building that causes.
He's also wired up their house with an audio loop. There's a microphone at my mother's craft desk that goes directly to the hearing loop and he can hear it anywhere in the main rooms of the house.
However, going out to places where he needs to be able to talk to people with less assistive technology available, things like the dictation mode on the phone area used. Also, sometimes he'll miss words (the start of a sentence until he realizes someone is talking to him, turns his head and the directional hearing aid mode gets them in focus). Being able to review the last 15 seconds of what was said on his iWatch would a technology that he would use.
As someone whose hearing has been degrading fast, this sounds like a feature that would be immensely useful. At some point you get tired of asking everyone to repeat themselves and start guessing by context (you've probably seen an old family member do this).
And even if it weren't super weird and creepy, it's 15 seconds, right? So what, that waitress rolledup, read the menu for less than 10 seconds, and then zoomed away, giving you a couple of seconds to get to and run the replay?
I've definitely had situations where I zoned out for a few seconds during a meeting or seminar, and want to see what was just spoken. That seems like a much stronger use case where you wouldn't want to interrupt the whole room to ask what was just spoken.
That doesn't seem to be a use case that I would use - now assuming someone is still speaking, you look at your watch (just bad form to me) you will very likely miss what is being talked about while reading what you previously missed. At least my one channel brain would.
This happens to me too and I enable 'Live Captions' (not meeting transcriptions) so that I always have a scroll back in case I miss something.
It's built into the meeting software I use and probably in most mainstream ones.
I tried OS transcription but those don't split out who's talking (since it's a single audio stream) so much less useful.
Anyways all that to say that at least in online meetings this problem is solved and addressing this problem in a stack that doesn't have meeting context is going to result in a worse experience.
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It's gonna make a loud ass chime when you do that, so I don't think that's the use case Apple was imagining.
Life saving feature for ppl with ADHD. M
Is it super weird and creepy if you I tell you I remember the last 15 seconds of what you said?
If I wasn’t talking to you, but you were eavesdropping and taking notes of everything I was saying to another person, yes.
That’s what the wrist computer is doing.
That's how you know no one in charge has a real life, they're all so disconnected from the reality of the bottom 90% that they think this is how we live.
Same with the "airpod live translation" thing, they probably spent more time implementing/testing it than the feature has been used in real life
Man I love live translation. I was traveling in the Middle East and went to see a movie and… it worked. My Spanish is mid, my Italian is barely there, my Arabic is near zero.
It’s hard for me to imagine not wanting language barriers to disappear.
This reminds me of the last time I saw an Arabic movie. It was last week. I used subtitles.
The demo of the woman at the train station listening to a concert promoter in Spanish, taking a flyer, saying “thank you” in English and walking away came off as quite geocentric.
> came off as quite geocentric
Did you mean to use another word here? I mean, the vast majority of people are still on Earth so many things are geocentric and that's rarely considered a problem.
> Did you mean to use another word here?
Hazarding a guess at egocentric considering it's just two characters next to each other swapped, and happens to fit.
I am mortified. I was going for something along the lines of ethnocentric. Thank you :)
Stopping to listen to someone is not very egocentric. Without the headphones (in the scenario) she would have just ignored him or politely declined the flyer.
So either way, wrong word.
They’re making an oblique reference to Pope Urban VIII.
Yeah, they're always leaving the Martians out!
It feels like a made for TV ad for accessibility.
What is a normal person?
It's so funny how the HN crowd is so quick to shout down people who are ableist sometimes, and so quick to BE ableist sometimes.
I kept thinking they were revealing glasses the way they gave a feature list before describing the item in question.
oh man, you have not been keeping up with the anti-social joneses.
Interactiving with people is so pre-covid!
Apple Watches have had an audio recorder app for years and no-one cares. Sometimes people are just looking for a reason to be offended.
You'd be shocked what the suite of sensors in the smartphone 99% of the population has in their pocket can do.
If I learned that someone I've been speaking to for a while was recording the conversation using the audio recorder app on their phone, I'd find that extremely creepy.
Fair enough. But people here are expressing disdain at this new feature, which is not that.
This is a new feature. It is an always on recording of conversation.
from the video I thought the wearer had to enable it, just as today where the wearer has to enable the audio recorder app.
In the video, the waitress said something, then the guy looked up on his watch what she said. Where's the part where he enables anything? Clearly it was already listening, otherwise it wouldn't have caught what she said.
People have plenty of conversations where if one party intentionally chose to record it, it would be big violation of trust.
This is basically just "always on" recording/transcribing that people have to intentionally remember to turn off, that's a pretty big difference.
My hope is it’s off by default and most people choose to keep it that way.
This featuring is undoubtedly to compete with, and crush, all of those stand-alone AI wearables that do the same thing. All those products failed, because people either didn’t find it that useful, or the creep factor was too high.
I could see some scenarios where it might be useful. Being at a conference, for example, and having a summary of everything I heard in the various presentations. But at the same time, it feels like the people being recorded should have knowledge of, and give consent to, the recording.
What sucks is that if you've ever pushed back on the people that use those stupid AI recorders they'll insist they're not actually recording you, its just a transcript and summary, and somehow that's fine. I'm not looking forward to more people explaining that to me, especially hardcore Apple fans.
Yeah, I had this happen last time I went to the doctor… one of the last places I’d want it.
At least with the Apple one they talked about how it works and it’s not some random product off Amazon doing god knows what.
My dad is probably the most likely person in my life to use something like this. I could see him sending me the summary of our dinner conversation or something, which would be very weird and off-putting. He has been very concerned about his memory as he ages, so I could see him using something like this to help with age related memory issues.
The doctor is probably the best place for this technology so that you can actually talk to your doctor rather than your doctor half-paying attention while they try to input everything into their EMR system on the computer.
Wife is a nurse. They trialed this out where she works and it was seriously a horrible experience. She ended up spending more time fixing the output then just taking her short hand notes.
This is what I’m worried about. Not so much the time fixing it, as the “well, that’s good enough” even though it might have issue. Over time, those small errors that may have seemed trivial at the time could become more serious issues.
They're already doing that on reddit. Fanboyism is so dangerous. No one should be that emotionally invested in a corporation, it lets them get away with anything.
It's also a violation of law in some places.
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-632/
I think they gave us enough information to understand their legal strategy. They will argue that the watch has sufficient processing power to transcribe the text in real time, and a plain text transcript is not a recording.
It likely stretches the definitions compared to what most people who do not want to be recorded think the laws should prevent, but on the other hand at least it couldn’t be used as legal evidence. It sounds intended as a memory aid, where passing a transcript for gossip purposes will hopefully be met with automatic skepticism as something that isn’t authenticated in any way and could be made up entirely.
They probably spent enormous amounts of time weighing how much legal jeopardy it would create for their customers.
I can’t tell how California law treats e.g. hitting the little microphone icon on the iPhone with the notes app open (realtime live transcription w/no recording that I know of) versus the voice memo app (illegal without all-party consent, as it creates a recording).
The world’s fastest smartphone typist can do what the mic icon does. In, say, court, “look I typed this” & “look this was dictated” would seem to be just as trustworthy since either can be edited after the fact. And someone could type and say it was transcribed, or transcribe and say it was typed. Whereas the law doesn’t want us voice recording and having the actual (forensically provable? w/the right budget?) record, unless everyone agreed.
It's a 15 second loop of audio history. If you didn't record the bit a minute ago, it's gone.
A short buffer is common with wake word audio processing.
It also summarizes your full conversations.
No, that part requires intent, where you have to turn it on with the button. It was in the demo.
Regardless, you'll be mortified if you search the app store for software or Amazon for hardware devices that do this! You can still pick up voice recorders at Staples, actually (I was surprised to see they still sell them, and they have weeks of recording time now, along with transcription software).
One of the options was always on, or always on while in work mode.
I’m curious if the lack of speaker identification is a privacy thing, or a technical limitation.
It looks like it uses PCC, so it may run into usage limits
You missed the additional feature launch where they listen to your entire life and give you transcriptions and summaries.
“Siri Recap”
https://support.apple.com/en-us/148354
> Siri Recap runs only when you choose. You can turn on Siri Recap in the Watch app on iPhone. When you turn it on, you can set a schedule based on time and/or location (for example, "only at work" or "never at night"), or you can manually turn it on and off. Across all these options, you can always turn it on or off at any time from Control Center.
> Siri Recap and Live Rewind help jog your memory, not provide a detailed record. Siri Recap doesn't produce a transcript. It generates a brief, high-level summary — comparable to notes you might jot down after a conversation. Live Rewind shows a text snippet of what was just said in the last 15 seconds, so you can catch something you missed.
And a crime in plenty of states. It shouldn't be, but it is.
My first thought was 2-party state violations, 24/7? However, any legally-minded people want to explain how they threaded the needle on this?
I have real respect for Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" architecture [0], I am not a hater, just trying to understand.
Are these the dividends Apple is getting from doing this truly impressive work?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49427928 - https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
It really depends on what you consider a recording. If audio is streamed though a transcription engine and never saved in a way that could be replayed, it's hard to argue that a recording has been made. The live audio was transcribed.
While I still do trust that on-device audio is safe, you can rewind and record it on another device.
The regulatory workaround is an "un-mutable" audio notification of some sort. This might be a very notable sound in the near future. I am curious what the chosen waveform might be:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/148354#:~:text=Audible,activ...
This is exactly what I was thinking too. How can this be legal in 2-party states?
The 2 party state thing is for phone calls. Outside of phone calls, you are generally allowed to record anything you can legally hear, same as you can photograph anything you can legally see.
>Outside of phone calls, you are generally allowed to record anything you can legally hear
I am not a lawyer but I do not believe that is true in any state except Nevada. Two-party consent almost always includes in person conversations. California Code, Penal Code 632:
>A person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, uses an electronic amplifying or recording device to eavesdrop upon or record the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) per violation, or imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-632/
As far as I can tell in 2 party states, it depends on the expectation of privacy, and even in public, your intent. In any case, here is their threading of the needle:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/148354#:~:text=app%2E-,How,s...
There's some more details on privacy at the bottom of the page:
> Audio Intelligence features are private by design
> a dedicated hardware-isolated compartment that processes audio in complete isolation from the rest of the system, then immediately deletes it
> Users are in control and [...] can decide exactly where and when Siri Recap takes notes, and can turn Siri Recap on or off at any time
> Siri Recap produces a brief, high-level summary of conversations — not a transcript — and is designed to exclude sensitive information like financial information or government-assigned identifiers
Yeah, even more weird was when they highlighted the privacy aspect of it. Sure, it maintains the wearer's privacy, just not that of anyone around them.
In what way does this violate the privacy of anyone around them? It doesn't even store audio recordings, which is something every smartphone has been able to do for 20 years.
It keeps information on what they said?
15 seconds at a time, when the owner activates the feature. The scale of its recall is not meaningfully different than someone scribbling down 15 seconds worth of what they hear someone say (or even just remembering it), and does not pose a greater privacy risk than a scratchpad or human memory.
It’s also much less effective at recording people speaking for long durations than the audio recording feature that every smartphone for the last 20 years has supported.
It also does not identify individual speakers.
If you don't want any one to write down or remember what you said, maybe don't say it to them?
Have you never had a conversation someone you trust that you prefer there not be an automated written record of?
This thread is so fascinating, I had no idea that because I'm comfortable having an intimate conversation with a friend means I'm also okay with a potentially permanent AI summary being generated based on it, and without my knowledge or consent!
Human memory keeps more information than this feature does.
Tell us everything, what happens on tour stays on tour - sure. Just approve that your data is - of course - anonymously used to train AI and regarding intelligence agencies or AI Acts: well, it is not us, it is them. Law is law, you know. We won't tell you anyway.
There is no privacy left. And to be honest, people worshipping their phones all day but complaining about privacy is the biggest WTF I have. This doesn't match.
Also I am a Mathematician and know statistics very well. The person, who is not on Facebook, but on WhatsApp, who works at X and lives in Y - we got you my friend.
You moved away? No problem! Someone photographed you casually, you weren't even the main character, we ignored you, and send it in a group chat you know nothing about. Well, we know all the others and can relate to anyway. And then? Well AI can very well predict you aging - easy. We have you already. Sleep well and dream of being unknown. Because... How do you know what you don't know?
I gave up on privacy because there is none anymore. Selling and publication of your data is a whole different story. And that's what Apple means by circumventing the rest.
> just not that of anyone around them.
What people around me? I exist in my own bubble. It's hip and rebranded selfmaxxing or something these days
Get off my lawn !1
It maintains everyone’s privacy.
Just because your voice was recorded doesn’t necessarily mean it can be played back and/or “stolen”.
Your soul won’t be sucked out through Apple Watches.
I think if someone followed me and my friend around and kept a transcript and summary of every conversation between and around us in a little notebook, I would have a basis to say my privacy was being violated, right?
Apple Watch doesn't maintain a transcript of every conversation. The user has to take action, and then it only goes back 15 seconds.
If someone is following you around within earshot and fiddling with... a notepad and pencil or a watch or a phone or a tape recorder, then yes, you have reason to be upset. I agree.
The ability of the Apple Watch to do what has always been possible doesn't materially change your privacy. [1]
Fundamentally, this is an accessibility feature, and Apple -- and other vendors -- have already shipped several similar ones. Were you equally upset by those too? AirProds already 'record' all audio around them! They can even be used as listening devices! https://support.apple.com/en-au/102479
This reminds me of parents getting hysterical when someone pulls out a DSLR at a kid's soccer game, while standing next to half a dozen parents who are all taking pictures with the phones and immediately uploading them to Meta.
[1] There are valid arguments to be made that this will be normalised and cloned... badly by Chinese and South Korean vendors without the privacy safeguards, at which point it is "too late" to put the genie back in the bottle.
Why does the 15 seconds matter? My conversations with friends would be vastly different if I knew at any second they could push a button and get a transcript of what we just said. I'd pretty much never make a joke again.
Now imagine knowing that they'll go home and be able to see a nice summary of the various conversations throughout the night. Just very normal social behavior, made easy by Apple.
Sorry, you're right about the transcript, it's the summary that's generated that's still off putting.
And I don't think we can compare this to weirdos being able to record other people, this is about when my friends come over and I have to wonder if they think it's normal to have running since "it's technically not recording" or "the summary is anonymized. It's normalizing behavior that's just a little weird, like people who use those ai recorders. I fail to see how that's not a violation of my privacy in some way.
Also you don't need to point out stupid gatchas about airpods, don't be an ass.
So—speaking to the general “you” here—not you, @jiggawatts, personally (I’m sure we’re both lovely, and I chose to respond here only because you seem to capture the prevailing opinion simply, thoughtfully, and reasonably)—
I respect that you believe that. I do not. It touches up against my basic relationship to reality and existence. To me, there’s a difference between a person and a machine. And between a meeting-of-the-minds-in-the-moment and an archival record.
To me, even the act of processing me through something-other-than-your-human-mind feels violative—essentializing and reductive. For me it’s wrapped up in ideas about attachment, and illusions of permanence, and attention and presence and the extra ineffable elements of human contact that unfold at levels other than the words and an exchange being about much more than the “information content.”
You don’t have to agree with me, but it’s frustrating for my conversation partner to take what I bring to a conversation while demanding to also take more than I’m willing to offer.
You’re free to allow people to record you, or analyze you, or machine-summarize you, or livestream you for the judgment and entertainment of the internet-dwelling masses, or whatever you’d like.
And I’m free to say: do not record me. Ever. Even on a rolling buffer, even “just for note-taking.” Even if it “only lives” some specific digital place. Unless I specifically say it’s OK, ahead of time; and we agree on how specifically the processed-me-byproduct will be used.
I’m not unreasonable! Sometimes the answer is yes! Is it for accessibility? Of course, go for it! Thank you for asking. Do we want to make a statement for the record? Great! But ask.
Funnily enough the “soul sucked out” trope occurred to me too, but it seems like we take different lessons from it. For me, it cues stories about a bunch of economically powerful people inserting themselves into places and situations where other people lived. Using their new camera technology to exploit those people’s images and likenesses, and justifying it by rolling their eyes together at how superstitious and backward and dumb those people were for not liking it. As if it were impossible for somebody to understand the thing and still not want it used on them.
And thus figuring their superiority gave them permission to “educate” the people whose likenesses they sought to exploit. And if the subjects still didn’t like it, it must be their shortcoming (since all right-thinking people obviously agree about matters of the soul and of cameras).
So it was OK to disregard their subjects’ beliefs, and their subjects’ dignity. The camera-pushers were entitled, by dint of their superior certainty, to treat people like specimens.
I agree there’s a parallel, but I think the people who were in the wrong were the people forcing the cameras on people who didn’t want to be involved.
[ETA, for @cindyllm: Your provocations are sublime, and I'm grateful that you continue to confound those of us who walk with the dead. You keep me off balance like nobody else. Is that your LinkedIn, or would I be spamming a random Canadian person?]
[dead]
Why is it off putting? Someone could be using a phone or a concealed omnidirectional microphone for this and you wouldn't know. You never know who's recording you anyway.
While I instinctively dislike any "secretly spying" devices, phones could do that for a while now. I wouldn’t have much use for my watch doing it, but my nephew swears by taking notes on an ipad with an app that has a sort of a playback: essentially a play bar that recreates the note as it is written, with audio included. Being able to playback the lecture afterwards that way is a huge benefit over pure notes and I wish I had something like that when I was in school.
Friction makes all the difference. Google used to sweat over 100ms in page loading.
Running a voice memory all day long is one thing. Pressing a button that automatically summarizes every conversation you'll ever have is a step change.
There's a difference between "weird people could choose to do this creepy thing and violate my trust" and "not weird people could forget to turn off this slightly less creepy thing and still violate my trust" Both of these suck, but honestly I don't appreciate that Apple is making me feel uneasy talking around my friends with Apple Watches. Not because I don't trust my friends, but because now it takes extra work for them to not do something kinda creepy.
Apple isn't making you feel anything, you're doing it all on your own. There may be a transcription of what you said, oh no the sky is falling.
You and I must have very different conversations with people that we trust to respond in such a way.
They're probably an AI bot for Apple
Jfc the tedium on this site. Sure, no one makes me feel anything, you're technically right buddy.
I don't appreciate Apple normalizing the already creepy ai note takers that exist and increasing the odds that someone will use them in casual or intimate conversations.
> It's made even worse by the fact that [...] their external designs are unchanged from past ones, so there's no way to tell who's always listening to everything
Yeah, I just decided the entire Apple Watch brand is suddenly a creeper device, so I'm not going to wear mine out, nor otherwise around other people.
I don't want to endorse creeper devices by appearing to wear one, and I don't want to be insensitive to people who might wonder whether I'm "note taking" everything we say.
Also, I got an iPhone specifically to use the Apple Watch awhile, so I'm probably switching back to GrapheneOS sooner than expected.
Same. I hope Apple doesn't kill AirPods for me the same way they just did the Apple Watch. I like those.
Wanted to add: the Watch has been off my wrist since the announcement, will be sold this week.
It's the first iteration of what will eventually be an on-device Siri/openclaw that not only has full access to your messages/docs/emails/life, but also has live audio access to what's going on around you.
Remember, this is all running via local models on-device.
This is how Siri/openclaw can hear you make plans for lunch, then add it to the calendar before you open your phone.
This is a step down the road to having an AI "presence" or entity that's always digesting sensory data, just like a human.
Marital strife is a few years out from getting a lot more evidence-based.
I just assume everything in public is audio/video recorded. In most places that's perfectly legal (with some exceptions). I don't think people should expect privacy in public. We faced the same panic about photographs when mobile phones started getting cameras. With some notable problems, everyone accepted it and moved on. The utility we get from cameras in phones is worth far more than the privacy violations which occur. The same thing is going to happen with this technology (and smart glasses).
I don't believe it. Photography was invented by non-Big Tech, and was widely popular and useful before Big Tech adopted it.
Miniature cameras on your body, and summaries of every conversation you have which you can store permanently, are concepts from either spy movies or weird sci-fi. I think it's a big mistake to see this as a continuation and not as a very different trend.
We may have to accept that Big Tech people are weird and cannot be trusted with any of this. See the Valley people now feeding all their personal conversations to agents. They are creepy and they are creating products in their own image.
> I don't believe it. Photography was invented by non-Big Tech, and was widely popular and useful before Big Tech adopted it.
Cameras were invented before big tech. Big tech took cameras and made them better and more ubiquitous. Microphones were invented before big tech. Big tech is taking them and making them better and more ubiquitous.
To be clear, I agree that the leaders of these companies are weird and untrustworthy. I'm arguing that the utility they will offer the world is worth far more to most people than the privacy concerns. Because of this, most people will happily adopt this technology.
More detail/discussion on the passive audio recording and transcription/summarization features:
Apple details how Apple Watch’s new Audio Intelligence features work in privacy paper https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49635185
Apple Doesn’t Want You to Worry About the New Apple Watch’s Listening Features https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49634947
Yeah very creepy, I'm afraid it'll be normalised in a few years, together with the cameras in our glasses.
I always knew this was coming eventually, with storage and compute getting so cheap, eventually every record can and then will be saved for security / convenience reasons. Every word uttered, every emotion shown on your face, every URL visited, every view you laid your eyes on.
I will miss the days that things could happen and be forgotten.
No doubt this stuff is all very useful, but I'd rather we skip this line of technology.
It makes a chime when enabled and only stays on for 15 second increments.
The degree to which people are going apeshit over this is absolutely absurd. People need to get a grip.
The always on ai summary feature does not, it just does its thing in the background.
I wonder if this feature will make people wary of Apple watch wearers.
It will make me as wary as I am around people that wear those little AI notetaker/recorders, so, very. At least with those it's a single use device that you can spot, now any Apple Watch could be listening, fun!
I don't know if this will be the common reaction, but after seeing this I've made a mental note to not discuss anything private with anyone wearing an Apple Watch. Makes me suspicious of iPhones, too, after years of defending them and saying that 'technology is always listening' is a silly conspiracy
“Always listening” in the way people have been conspiratorially claiming your phone is listening to show you ads is silly.
Always listening in that the owner could run an application that could be recording them and you on the other hand has been a possibility since pretty much day one.
That's a good point, anyone with a smart phone could trivial have a voice recorder going all day and run it through whisper
You would be aghast to spend any time in tech these days. I would wager more than 20% of the people in this field right now are wearing devices which record everything they say in every conversation and ship it directly to a transcription LLM and into some other tools. Go to SV and I bet this number jumps to nearer to 30-40%
You should need to come up with a derogatory name for people wearing apple watches like Glasshole for people with google glass
Apple Watch Spy
Apple Watch Tattletale
Apple Informer
Watchholes
iSnitches
Apple Watcher?
It will stop arguments between partners "you said this week ago, now you say this" okay honey, let's compare our transcripts.
This is exactly the plot of the Black Mirror episode "The entire history of you"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
Ted Chiang (author of Arrival) wrote about this
Looking forward to it!
It's so creepy. So their watch is now always recording audio, and the rumors say that their next generation of AirPods Pro will gain cameras.
I don't want an always-listening watch. I don't want earbuds with cameras. I don't want people around me to have those things either. I hate it.
“These features do not create or store audio recordings, and raw audio used for processing is completely inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user, or Apple. This is because the S11 chip on Apple Watch Series 12 includes Secure Exclave, a dedicated hardware-isolated compartment that processes audio in complete isolation from the rest of the system, then immediately deletes it.”
People love to get worked up over technology that is actually private and secure.
Meanwhile they’ll use Google and Facebook without a second thought.
So I took issue with the automated note taking of conversations and didn't mention audio recordings. No mention of using Google or Facebook either.
How is this different from a privacy standpoint of someone simply memorising what you said in the last fifteen seconds and scribbling it down onto a piece of paper?
You’re sounding… hysterical.
Even if you regularly say things that must never be tied back to you, like.. you are in the mafia or you’re an actual spy or whatever, and every single person around you has this on their wrist listening to every word you say all of the time… Nothing changes for you.
The users of the watches still have to take action to use the audio, which they too would have heard anyway, and could have transcribed and texted to someone or written down.
Oh… wait… are you MIB? Are you concerned that your memory eraser wand won’t wipe Apple Watch recordings of the last 15 seconds, allowing the public to finally know about aliens amongst us?
I know that sounds silly, but unless you can erase the memories stored in human brains, then you must realise that everything you say in the presence of meat computers with audio listening devices attached (ears) can be recorded (memorised).
> How is this different from a privacy standpoint of someone simply memorising what you said in the last fifteen seconds and scribbling it down onto a piece of paper?
I would hope to not be friends with such a fucking weird person tbh. But I guess if it's automated into a sexy device it's fine.
Again, you sound absolutely hysterical.
This isn’t on all the time. It’s on in 15 second increments and clearly chimes when enabled. This is literally just the equivalent of saying “one sec while I get a pen to write this down” and then taking a note.
The summary feature is always running, and is also creepy to me.
>How is this different from a privacy standpoint of someone simply memorising what you said in the last fifteen seconds and scribbling it down onto a piece of paper?
The difference is extremely obvious, to the point that you even typed out one of the differences!
Okay, so it’s functionally identical. Got it.
You think we’re talking about functionality and not automation. Got it. Try again.
I mean it's nonsense, apple can update the "secure exclave" software at any time to exfiltrate the audio if they want or get ordered to.
If you read that quote carefully you'll also notice it's only the audio that's ever mentioned as inaccessible to apple etc but never mentions anything about the actual transcript, wanna bet that goes into their little advertisement venture?
There is no transcript - you make claims about what Apple “never mentions “ but they do - in great detail:
“Audio from the microphone enters the Secure Exclave of Apple Watch, where it is initially processed for speech, sounds, or music, without transcribing or storing the raw audio. This buffer is a continuously overwritten stream that exists only within the protected hardware and never creates an audio recording”
https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Audio_Intelligence_Privac...
You just ignored the previous point. You linked to the audio never getting recorded or leaving the device. The previous post said the transcription of that audio leave that part of the device. They must, otherwise they could not be displayed and saved.
It’s great for exposing people abusing their authority by making off the record demands that they know are not kosher.
You can simply not talk if you don't want people to listen?
I think most people want to talk and have only the person they are talking to listen.
I think the times someone has something to say that is so sensitive they don't want a record of any kind kept, are rare unless you are a clandestine agent or military - and it's probably worth just asking those in literal earshot "Hey, I need to tell you something off the record, please make sure to turn off any AI transcription or similar."
IDK about you but most of the shit I say, I'd be happy for the hearer's assistant to be listening and potentially adding the things we agreed on to their to-do lists or calendars.
hmm. You talk to your coworker about some juicy gossip in cafe next to me. I have to put lead in my ears? and who cares about people with different languages, hearing difficulties etc etc...