The new Apple Watch listens so you can read a conversation you missed. How far back does it go?

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Apple calls it Live Rewind: double-press the Digital Crown and the watch shows the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text. It keeps a rolling buffer of sound to do it, processed in a hardware-isolated part of the chip that Apple says never records audio.

The chip has a hardware-isolated compartment Apple calls a Secure Exclave. What gets processed there is not reachable by the operating system, by apps, by you, or by Apple.

The new Apple Watch shows you the last 15 seconds of what was just said. It chimes so you can't do it secretly.

Source: Apple · checked Sep 2026