This is Technology Bytes, episode 192 for November 8, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week, I’m talking about new intelligence that has come to the Apple Watch.
Now, when we talked about the release of iOS 27 and what it was going to entail, when we looked at the WWDC and all of that, a couple of things that the Apple Watch did, one was called Recap, one was called Rewind, are things that were going to be offered in the future.
Many people I listened to thought Apple might never release those things because of privacy concerns.
And a couple times over the last weeks, I’ve talked about the watches that I purchased on promise and said, You’re never supposed to do that, and those are two of the things that I was hoping would come to the Apple Watch, and that’s why I purchased the new ones and let my son take the other.
This week, Apple released the 27.3 beta 1 of all of their operating systems, and they released a lot of things with this newest and latest beta.
And two of the things are Recap and Rewind that came to the Apple Watch.
And then there are a bunch of other things.
In fact, it’s probably going to allow me to fill quite a bit of time in this microcast just covering the things that they have released in this latest of the betas for 27.3.
Today I’m going to focus just on the two things for the Apple Watch.
One is recap and one is rewind.
I keep saying them in that order probably because that’s alphabetical, but I’m going to do the rewind first and then I’ll do recap second.
And the reason is I have more to say about recap because I’ve used it more, and on the rewind I really haven’t tested it all that much.
As a reminder, rewind actually is a 15 to 20 second capture of whatever was said last around your Apple Watch.
And so when you double click the crown, then it puts that text on your screen, actual recording of the last 15 to 20 seconds.
And so it’s basically there so that if you miss something, you don’t have to ask someone to repeat it.
I haven’t used it all that much.
I’ve tested it a few times because it really hasn’t come up as something that I have needed.
And oftentimes when I’m listening to people, I lean to my wife and say, What was said?
or What did that person say?
and then she is my rewind person.
But it does work.
It does show the exact conversation.
It is kind of weird.
It does make a noise when you activate it, so people know that you’re going back to look at a conversation if they know that that happens on an Apple Watch.
But it does what it’s supposed to do.
I’ve heard some people say it’s hard to activate, but I’ve done it a couple times and it just showed right up.
It was no problem whatsoever.
So I might get more experience with that in the future, but I don’t know if it’s something that I’ll even use all that much.
Rewind, however, is a— oh, sorry, wrong one.
Recap is…
A service and an opportunity, anyway, whatever you want to call that type of thing that Apple’s doing.
So just to define it a little bit.
So what Apple does is records the conversation that you might be having with—it doesn’t really matter with whom—if you have the Recap feature turned on, and then you can’t get to the recording.
And what it does is it records using your watch.
It sends the data to the iPhone, so you have to have both.
And when you set them up, it does a little communication test between the two to make sure it understands where they’re at and that it’s going to work.
But no one can get to the recording.
And then what the phone does is it summarizes whatever the conversation was.
It puts a title on it.
It gives you some bullet points.
It tells you what was spoken about.
And then you have the opportunity to turn it on and turn it off in certain places.
So you could say, I only want to turn it on when I’m at work, and then—or maybe if I’m at work and I’m at home, or I don’t want it on at home, but I want it on at work.
And then beyond that, you can turn it on manually any time that you would like.
And so I’ve been having it turn on automatically when I’m at work, and it records conversations.
The other day I met with my boss, and it really didn’t record that conversation for some reason.
I don’t know if it was doing something funny, but the second meeting we had, which was with the managers that report to me, it recorded and summarized all that was said and what we were going to do moving forward and when it was going to happen.
It was really pretty cool.
And there were other times where it captured conversations, and I’m like, okay, that’s pretty neat.
And then you can go in and decide, do you want to save the conversation?
If you do nothing, I think it disappears in like seven days.
But you can go in and if you interact with that conversation, then it saves it, or you can hit a button and then save it for as long as you want to have it around.
I have a couple other examples, but I want to talk about the two watches that I have.
Both will do this function.
One is the Ultra 4 and one is the Apple Watch Series 12.
And so when I set it up, I was wearing my Apple Watch Series 12, and then when I went to work, nothing happened on my Ultra 4.
And so then I went and looked, and I had to turn it on on that watch as well.
So it’s kind of interesting.
It treats them as independent, even though I can see the conversation summaries from both of them.
I had to go into both watches and set it up on the watch, have it connect with the phone with the, you know, audio linking as it does, and then I could use the feature no matter which watch I was wearing.
One more real-world example.
So today I had to take my car in for service.
It’s just normal service.
I drive an EV6, and so it’s fairly simple service anyway.
And so when I got to the car dealership, I turned on the recap feature on my watch because I’m not at work, so it wouldn’t turn on automatically.
And so I recorded the conversation that I had with the person who was going to be talking to the maintenance people to do the thing, because there’s a couple things that happened to my car over the last couple weeks that were needing to be looked at.
So I just wanted to make sure I got some numbers on what it took to replace some certain pieces on the car.
And so that was pretty cool.
And then while I was running around with my wife, leaving my car at the dealership, I get a text that says, Hey, do you want a payoff on your car?
And I said, Yeah, that’d be great, because I was just curious with how much I owed versus how much they might give me for my car.
And then a guy called and said, Are you really interested in selling your car?
And I said, Well, not really, because I’m buried in it.
There’s no reason.
I just wanted to see the numbers to see how bad off I was.
And so then he said, Okay, I’ll make that note.
Apparently his boss got ahold of him.
He calls me, and longer story shorter maybe, I end up meeting with him at the dealership to see what can be done.
So I have a new car that they’ve kind of picked out for me, same car, EV6, and then I have my car, and there’s no way I can get into a new car.
I don’t have any money to put down.
But the whole time I have this recap feature on.
And so one of the things that they offered was me to buy myself out of the lease and get the same payment that I’m making at the moment.
And so I said, Yeah, I might be interested in that.
I’m not deep into my lease yet, but, you know, I probably should have just bought it outright in the first place because I didn’t plan on ever turning it in.
I really like the car.
And so I turned recap on and captured that.
And as I was leaving and saying, I’ll probably come back and do this feature, one of the guys said to me, Well, I can get this kind of payment for you probably.
I know what it says on the paper, but I can get quite a bit less because I have ways to buy down a rate and do yada yada yada.
So I had recap on to do that.
And then when I decided to pull the trigger, my wife and I went back.
We’re going through all the financing.
We’re talking to the finance guy, and I said, I don’t know what my payment is, so I’m not sure why I’m talking to you.
And so he went through all this, and all this time I have the recap on.
And so…
When I got home after I had decided what to do, then I was looking at the information, and it’s very cool because I told the finance guy, Look, this guy told me I could get this price, and he goes, There’s no way you can get that price.
And I said, I’m just telling you what he said.
And so anyway, he goes, I think it’s going to be more like this price, and then he laid out exactly what he was going to do.
So that conversation is all there that says, Here’s your price, here’s the monthly term, here’s when your next payment’s going to be due, here’s the things you declined.
All that was captured in the recap.
So then I went back and looked at the last conversation recap that I had with the other guy in the office, and I found the conversation, and it had recapped and laid out the fact that he had given me a pretty much, it was probably $50, $60 less price than what I walked out the door with.
And so it’ll be interesting to go back to the dealership and say, Look, this is what the guy told me, even though I already told him he told me that, and show him that I have record of that conversation.
Anyway, it’s a pretty cool feature.
I can understand why it makes some people nervous.
The fact that Apple is doing it the way they’re doing it, not actually giving anyone access to the recording, you don’t know who said what because it’s just a summary of the conversation.
But it’s really cool to have because I can go back and jog my memory about what happened in this particular meeting.
So I’m really excited about it.
I will continue to use it.
I hope that the world at large does not get Apple all bent out of shape and they have to turn it off because I will use it to its full extent.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@merigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
