Earlier this year, Apple announced Ternus as his successor, ending Cook’s lengthy stint as CEO but retaining him on as executive chairman. <\/p>\n
The issue is no longer hypothetical. Apple Watch Series 12 will have audio intelligence that can listen for speech, recover 15 seconds of conversation, and summarize daily conversations. <\/p>\n
Apple claims its technology doesn’t store or access raw audio. <\/p>\n
Investors should note Apple’s privacy-first stance as wearables become an important AI battlefield, and Meta Platforms (META) has shown customer demand. <\/p>\n
Apple Watch AI will listen, but Apple says it won’t record <\/p>\n
Apple’s new Audio Intelligence features blur the lines between a timepiece and an always-on AI assistant. <\/p>\n
Live Rewind lets users double-press the Digital Crown to see the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet. Siri Recap creates titles and high-level notes from conversations, while Sound Recognition listens for alarms, sirens, and doorbells. <\/p>\n
Apple has placed many restrictions<\/a> on such possibilities. <\/p>\n The new S11 chip has a Secure Exclave that’s segregated in hardware to handle audio independently from the rest of the system and promptly destroy it. Siri Recap doesn’t tag particular speakers, but Live Rewind makes a ding and shows an on-screen notification when it is on. <\/p>\n More sophisticated Apple Intelligence queries may use Private Cloud Compute<\/a>, Apple’s cloud AI architecture. Apple maintains that it uses any personal data transmitted to the system exclusively to perform the request and that even Apple cannot view it later. <\/p>\n The same Audio Intelligence features are coming to Apple Watch Ultra 4, which starts at $799<\/a>. Series 12 starts at $399. Both are available Sept. 18. <\/p>\n Apple has billions riding on its wearable strategy <\/p>\n Wearables may not be Apple’s biggest business, but they already constitute a meaningful cash source. <\/p>\n Apple generated<\/a> $7.88 billion from Wearables, Home and Accessories in its June quarter, up 6% from $7.40 billion a year earlier. Revenue from the category reached $27.28 billion during the first nine months of fiscal 2026, up 2%. <\/p>\n The larger corporation also enters the Ternus period<\/a> with a strong financial position. Apple announced June-quarter sales of $109.4 billion, up 16%, and diluted earnings per share soared 29% to $2.02. It set yet another record for its installed base of active devices. <\/p>\n Apple invests heavily to keep that ecosystem current. R&D spending was $11.73 billion in the June quarter and $34.04 billion through nine months of fiscal 2026. <\/p>\n The investment is rising in AI but Apple’s problem is different from that of pure software businesses. It requires AI capabilities that can take advantage of the closeness of wrist-worn gadgets without wrecking a privacy reputation built up over years. <\/p>\n Millions of AI glasses have been sold by the company, and Ray-Ban Meta is the world’s best-selling AI glasses product, it says. <\/p>\n The glasses put cameras<\/a>, microphones and Meta AI into an everyday frame, letting users record video or ask questions about what they’re seeing. <\/p>\n More Tech: <\/p>\n The company is booming, but profits are lagging<\/a>. Meta’s Reality Labs posted $431 million in second-quarter revenue, up 16%, with the business citing increased sales of AI glasses as a partial driver of the growth. But the division lost $4.62 billion in operations in the quarter and $8.65 billion in the first half. <\/p>\n Those stats give Apple’s privacy approach more than a philosophical position. Meta has shown that wearable artificial intelligence may create consumer demand, but also that establishing the category needs massive investment and presents tough societal problems. <\/p>\n Apple is betting it can get into that more personal age of AI without asking people to give up the privacy standards tied to its brand. <\/p>\n What remains unanswered is whether the folks standing next to an Apple Watch user will see the difference the same way. <\/p>\n Related: Bank of America’s unique take on Apple stock as Ternus takes reins<\/a> <\/p>\n This story was originally published by TheStreet<\/a> on Sep 13, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing<\/a> section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Apple (AAPL) is embedding artificial intelligence more deeply into something millions of people wear every day, posing a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1572,23436,49,48,136006,61],"class_list":["post-894315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-apple-watch","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-john-ternus","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a> Apple’s AI ambitions collide with a very human concernBenjamin Fanjoy \/ Getty Images Meta shows both the opportunity and the cost of wearable AI <\/p>\n