The iPhone Duo may have taken the spotlight, with Apple positioning it as the device built for AI, but every other product on stage at its September 9 event told the same story.

The Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 exemplify the company's focus on building devices for the AI era. Both watches sport the new S11 chip, which unlocks deeper AI capabilities, including a brand-new suite called Audio Intelligence. The Siri Recap feature, part of the suite, helps position the watch as an AI wearable, without the company even needing to call it that.

Siri Recap provides users with high-level summaries from conversations recorded on the watch while the feature is activated, much like the AI note-taking app Granola, which has become massively popular and recently hit a $1.5 billion valuation. Users can turn Siri Recap on or off at any time from the Control Center, and, when on, these insights are then populated in the new Siri app. This is not a traditional transcript with timestamps, speaker attributions, or even quotes, so it is less of a voice memo replacement but, more so, a way to keep track of conversation highlights.

The Live Rewind feature works a bit differently, always listening, and when activated, giving users a 15-second transcript of the conversation that just happened. When activated, it plays an audible chime and has a full-display animation of a microphone so that people know the feature was activated. Predicting the hesitation of having AI listen to all your conversations, Apple clarified that the audio of the conversations is not recorded and the summaries and text snippets are end-to-end encrypted in the Siri app with iCloud syncing. Both features will arrive in beta later this year. Other AI Apple Watch Audible Intelligence features include:

• Sound recognition on Apple Watch: alerts users who are deaf or hard of hearing of important sounds
• Shazam on Apple Watch: now instantly detects the music playing around you and automatically displays the song title and artist's name on the Music Recognition widget in Smart Stack

Of course, all of the products, including the watches, AirPods 5, iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be able to take advantage of the new Siri AI overhaul, which The Deep View documented during WWDC in June, including a personal context that deeply informs your AI answers and more seamless conversational interactions with Siri that will allow for better assistance and dictation improvements. To support these features, the new phone lineup also got an Apple silicon upgrade with the new A20 Pro chip.

Our Deeper View

Apple is playing the long game with AI features, not necessarily marketing anything as an "AI device," but baking in features that will make a difference in users' everyday lives. It supports this with powerful chipsets that enable the features already announced at WWDC as part of iOS 27 and the other new OS-es, while also future-proofing the devices for future integrations. In the AI wearable realm, Apple may not have released AirPods with cameras, but the new Apple Watch lineup helps fill that void, since it's something people wear every day and now unlocks AI features exclusive to that device. Apple is also doing this in a distinctly Apple way, prioritizing user privacy. While it would have been easy for the Apple Watch to do what other AI wearables like the Plaud AI pin do (simply record and transcribe conversations), Apple chose not to and prioritized privacy instead. Though, I must admit, the Live Rewind and Siri Recap features do push the boundary and user perception will be super interesting to watch.