Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at its Surprise and Shine event in Cupertino, introducing a suite of AI-powered audio features designed to help you capture and recall moments from your day. While the hardware remains largely unchanged, the new smartwatches bring significant software upgrades centered around what Apple calls “Audio Intelligence”—a direct response to the growing wave of AI wearables entering the market.
Audio Intelligence: Rewinding and Remembering Your Day
The standout feature of the Apple Watch Series 12 is “Live Rewind,” which lets you go back up to 15 seconds in a conversation. A double press of the Digital Crown displays the previous 15 seconds as a text snippet, which you can ask Siri about or save to the new Siri app for later reference. This follows the pattern Samsung Galaxy S26 FE vs S25 FE: Explaining the $50 Price Increase described around incremental feature additions across product lines.
“Siri Recap” complements Live Rewind by using ambient listening to capture high-level notes from your conversations—think key takeaways from a team meeting or parent-teacher conference. When enabled, Apple Intelligence automatically generates a title and key points in the Siri app after each conversation. A new “Sound Recognition” feature rounds out the audio suite, listening for sirens, alarms, doorbells, and crying babies to assist people who are hard of hearing. Apple emphasizes that these audio intelligence features do not create or store audio recordings.
Health Sensing and Readiness Tracking
Beyond audio, both the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 feature an upgraded health-sensing system with increased electrode surface area for better ECG readings. Redesigned photodiodes arranged in a ring capture light more efficiently, while more power-efficient green LEDs enable accurate heart-rate measurements throughout the day, even during motion. Background heart rate readings are now taken every five seconds all day long—60x more frequent than before—providing higher frequency continuous heart rate data as a key health indicator.
The watches introduce “readiness scores” that analyze your recent activity, vitals, and sleep each morning, distilling everything into a single score showing how prepared your body is for the day ahead. A new “Health Age” feature lets you compare your key health metrics—including VO2 max and sleep—against your actual age. As covered earlier, Motorola Previews Android 15 Update and New Themed Icons showed how wearable makers are increasingly focusing on health and wellness tracking as a competitive advantage.
The Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399, while the Apple Watch Ultra 4 costs $499.
المصدر: TechCrunch
