Siri Recap & Live Rewind vs. Ayumi
Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 add two Audio Intelligence features: Siri Recap and Live Rewind. Both turn speech into text on your wrist, which raises a fair question: where does Ayumi fit?
The short answer is that they solve a different problem. Siri Recap and Live Rewind are built to forget — they keep a short summary or a 15-second snippet and throw the audio away. Ayumi is built to keep — your own words, in full, as files you own.
What Siri Recap and Live Rewind do
Section titled “What Siri Recap and Live Rewind do”Siri Recap takes ambient notes on the conversations around you, on a schedule or when you switch it on, and produces a short, high-level summary. It does not produce a transcript. Audio is processed in a protected buffer and deleted once processed, so there is no recording to go back to. Summaries appear in the Recaps tab of the Siri app and are deleted after 7 days unless you save or export them.
Live Rewind shows the last 15 seconds of speech as text when you double-press the Digital Crown. It is a “what did they just say?” tool. An unsaved snippet disappears shortly after the display dims.
Neither feature attributes statements to speakers, and Apple notes that both can be incomplete or inaccurate.
What Ayumi does
Section titled “What Ayumi does”Ayumi is a voice journal. You decide to record, you speak, and the recording becomes a journal entry:
- The full transcript is kept. On-device transcription writes a verbatim transcript; nothing is condensed away unless you choose a profile that summarizes.
- The audio is kept. The recording stays attached to the entry, so you can listen again or re-transcribe it later with a different engine.
- Everything is a file you own. Each entry is a Markdown file in a folder you choose, with no expiry and no account. See Concept.
Side by side
Section titled “Side by side”| Siri Recap | Live Rewind | Ayumi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Remember the gist of conversations | Catch a line you just missed | Capture your own thinking, in full |
| What it listens to | Conversations around you | The last 15 seconds of speech | What you record, while you record |
| How it starts | A schedule (time or place), or switched on manually | Double-press the Digital Crown | Tap Record, Siri, a complication, the Action Button, or a Shortcut |
| Output | Title and key points — no transcript | A 15-second text snippet | Verbatim transcript with a title, or whatever your profile asks for |
| Original audio | Deleted after processing | Not kept | Kept, attached to the entry |
| Retention | 7 days unless saved or exported | Gone after the display dims unless saved | Until you delete it |
| Where it lives | Siri app, synced through iCloud with end-to-end encryption | Siri app, if saved | Markdown files in your own folder or iCloud Drive |
| Processing | Transcribed and condensed on iPhone, summarized by Private Cloud Compute | On Apple Watch and iPhone; Private Cloud Compute if you ask Siri about it | On-device by default; a cloud engine only with your own API key and consent |
| Speaker labels | No | No | Available with Gemini Transcribe, Muse Voice Transcribe, and xAI Grok |
| Can you edit or reuse it? | Edit in the Siri app, export to Notes or Journal | Save or ask Siri | Plain Markdown — open in Obsidian, an editor, or any AI tool |
| Devices | Series 12 or Ultra 4, with iPhone 16 or later | Series 12 or Ultra 4, with iPhone 16 or later | iPhone (iOS 26 or later) and Mac (macOS 26 or later); Apple Watch on watchOS 10 or later |
The difference that matters: summary vs. your words
Section titled “The difference that matters: summary vs. your words”A summary is someone else’s reading of what you said. It’s useful for a conversation you were part of, where the point is to recall the outcome. It is much less useful for your own thinking, where the half-formed sentence, the tangent, or the exact phrasing is often the part worth keeping.
Siri Recap is deliberately designed so that the original is gone: no audio and no transcript, only a condensed version. That is a strong privacy choice for a feature that listens ambiently to other people. But it also means a recap can’t be checked against what was really said, and it can’t be re-read differently later.
Ayumi takes the opposite position for a narrower job. It only listens when you ask it to, and when it does, it keeps everything — so that a year from now you, or the AI tool you point at your journal, can still work from the original.
Privacy, from two directions
Section titled “Privacy, from two directions”Both approaches take privacy seriously, but they protect different things.
- Siri Recap protects by not keeping. Raw audio is never stored, transcripts are never produced, summaries filter out sensitive details such as financial data and identifiers, and unsaved recaps expire after 7 days.
- Ayumi protects by keeping it with you. Recordings and transcripts stay on your device or in your own iCloud Drive folder. Ayumi has no server and no account. Transcription is on-device by default, and audio leaves the device only when you choose a cloud engine with your own key — after a consent prompt.
When to use which
Section titled “When to use which”| Situation | Better fit |
|---|---|
| You missed what someone just said | Live Rewind |
| You want the gist of a day of conversations without recording anything | Siri Recap |
| You’re thinking out loud on a walk and want every word | Ayumi |
| You want a voice journal you can reread, search, and keep for years | Ayumi |
| You want to feed your own words to an AI tool later | Ayumi — plain Markdown, full transcript |
| You need to check exactly what was said | Ayumi — the audio is still there |
They also work together. A recap exported to Journal or Notes reminds you what happened; a short Ayumi recording afterwards captures what you think about it.
Get started with Ayumi on Apple Watch
Section titled “Get started with Ayumi on Apple Watch”Ayumi’s watch app works on any Apple Watch running watchOS 10 or later, paired with an iPhone running Ayumi — no Series 12 required. Record on your wrist and your iPhone transcribes it into your journal. See Apple Watch and Voice Recording.
From the same maker: Kitae, a dead-simple strength-training log
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