Apple on Wednesday launched the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at its Surprise and Shine event in Cupertino. While smartwatches have not received major hardware updates, they have received some major software updates.
Most notably, Apple is targeting the growth of AI wearables with a new “Audio Intelligence” feature that lets you rewind time and remember details from everyday conversations.
smartwatches are launching with “Live Rewind,” a feature that Apple describes as letting you go back up to 15 seconds. Pressing the Digital Crown twice shows the previous 15 seconds of conversation as a text preview. You can ask Siri about the content of that transcript, or save it in the new Siri app to review later.
There is a “Siri Recap” feature designed to help you remember important moments from everyday conversations. It uses ambient listening to record your conversations at a high level, such as takeaways from team meetings or parent-teacher conferences. When Siri Recap is on, after a conversation, Apple Intelligence automatically generates names and milestones in a new Siri app.
The new “Voice Recognition” feature will be able to listen to sounds like sirens, alarms, doorbells, crying babies and more for the hard of hearing.
Apple says these audio features do not create or store audio recordings.
Both new smartwatches have a health sensing system with increased electrode area for better skin contact during ECG readings. For improved light detection, newly designed photodiodes are arranged in a ring to capture light more efficiently. There is also a very powerful green LED that allows accurate heart rate measurement throughout the day, even during activity.
The new health monitoring system provides higher frequency heart rate data, which is a key indicator of your overall health. Background heart rate readings are now available every five seconds throughout the day, even when you’re on the move. That’s 60x more often than before.
The smartwatch is taking a page from the smartwatch with a new readiness score that analyzes your activity, priorities, and sleep each morning, distilling it all into a single score that indicates how ready your body is for the day.
There’s also a new “Healthy Age” feature that lets users see how their key health metrics compare to their actual age, based on data from their watch, including VO2 max, sleep and more.
Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399, while Apple Watch Ultra 4 costs $499.
When you purchase through a link in our article, we may receive a small fee. This does not affect the independence of our editors.
