Apple Doesn’t Want You to Worry About the New Apple Watch’s Listening Features
Apple Doesn’t Want You to Worry About the New Apple Watch’s Listening Features
苹果不希望你对新款 Apple Watch 的监听功能感到担忧
The new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 come not just with better fitness tracking and upgraded noise reduction, but also a whole new way to listen. 新款 Apple Watch Series 12 和 Ultra 4 不仅带来了更出色的健身追踪和升级的降噪功能，还引入了一种全新的“聆听”方式。
Apple announced on Wednesday that the two smartwatches come with four opt-in “audio intelligence” tools that are powered by audio gathered by the watches’ microphones. They include sound and music recognition, a conversation recap feature, and “Live Rewind” so a user can see a transcription of anything that was said in their environment in the previous 15 seconds. 苹果周三宣布，这两款智能手表配备了四项可选的“音频智能”工具，这些工具由手表麦克风采集的音频驱动。其中包括声音和音乐识别、对话摘要功能，以及“实时回放”（Live Rewind）功能，用户可以通过该功能查看过去 15 秒内周围环境中所说内容的转录文本。
Seemingly wary that the features could make it feel like the walls have ears, Apple is emphasizing that all of them are built to prioritize privacy and security using the extensive infrastructure the company has developed to protect its other Apple Intelligence and Siri services. As more and more of these types of features debut, though, the audio intelligence announcements are a reminder that AI-powered tools are becoming increasingly universal in all areas of computing and life. 苹果似乎担心这些功能会让用户感觉“隔墙有耳”，因此强调所有功能在设计时都优先考虑隐私和安全，并利用了公司为保护其他 Apple Intelligence 和 Siri 服务而开发的广泛基础设施。然而，随着此类功能的不断推出，这些音频智能公告也提醒我们，人工智能驱动的工具正变得在计算和生活的各个领域日益普及。
“These features do not create or store audio recordings, and raw audio used for processing is completely inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user, or Apple,” the company wrote in a report shared with WIRED. “这些功能不会创建或存储音频录音，且用于处理的原始音频对于操作系统、应用程序、用户或苹果公司本身而言都是完全不可见的，”苹果在分享给《连线》（WIRED）杂志的一份报告中写道。
The new Apple Watch features are designed to process as much data locally on devices as possible, so potentially sensitive data doesn’t go to the cloud. Sound Recognition, for example, alerts users about sounds in their environment—including doorbells, sirens, alarms, or, say, a baby crying—without sending any data off the watch. The tools that do send information out to the cloud preprocess the data so it isn’t raw audio files, then use Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. 新款 Apple Watch 的功能旨在尽可能在设备本地处理数据，从而避免潜在的敏感数据上传至云端。例如，“声音识别”功能会在检测到环境声音（如门铃、警报器、闹钟或婴儿啼哭）时提醒用户，而无需将任何数据传出手表。对于确实需要将信息发送到云端的工具，系统会先对数据进行预处理，确保其并非原始音频文件，然后再使用苹果的“私有云计算”（Private Cloud Compute）基础设施进行处理。
Apple emphasizes that its on-device capabilities for Apple watches have expanded thanks to the company’s new S11 chips. The chips include a special memory-protected space that Apple calls the Secure Exclave. Designed specifically for sensor data, the exclave is an isolated buffer that is inaccessible to the rest of the operating system where Apple Watch can hold and process audio data in a protected space. 苹果强调，得益于公司新款 S11 芯片，Apple Watch 的设备端处理能力得到了扩展。这些芯片包含一个苹果称为“安全隔离区”（Secure Exclave）的特殊内存保护空间。该隔离区专为传感器数据设计，是一个独立于操作系统其余部分的缓冲区，Apple Watch 可以在这个受保护的空间内存储和处理音频数据。
A new Shazam feature “listens” for music and will generate a signature of a song that is stored in the Secure Exclave. If the user navigates to Shazam to find out what the music is, the tool will send that signature—not an audio file—to Shazam’s servers for identification. (Shazam is an Apple-owned service.) If the user doesn’t prompt to identify the music, or as soon as they do, the special signature is “immediately” deleted from the watch. 一项新的 Shazam 功能会“聆听”音乐并生成一段存储在“安全隔离区”中的歌曲特征码。如果用户打开 Shazam 查看音乐信息，该工具会将特征码（而非音频文件）发送到 Shazam 的服务器进行识别。（Shazam 是苹果旗下的服务。）如果用户没有发起识别请求，或者在识别完成后，该特征码会“立即”从手表中删除。
The recap feature, known as Siri Recap, can be set to be on all the time and generate recaps of any substantive conversation, or it can be given a schedule to listen in at certain times during the day. A dedicated AI model determines when speech is occurring without recording or transcribing any data. If it detects a conversation, audio goes into a protected buffer within the Secure Exclave on the Apple Watch, the watch encrypts it, and then transmits it using Apple’s special secure Bluetooth pairing to the Secure Exclave on a user’s iPhone. Then the audio is immediately deleted from the Apple Watch. 名为“Siri 摘要”（Siri Recap）的功能可以设置为全天候开启，对任何实质性对话生成摘要，也可以设定在一天中的特定时间段进行监听。一个专用的人工智能模型负责判断何时出现语音，而不会录制或转录任何数据。如果检测到对话，音频会进入 Apple Watch 上“安全隔离区”内的受保护缓冲区，手表将其加密，然后通过苹果特殊的安全蓝牙配对传输到用户 iPhone 上的“安全隔离区”。随后，音频会立即从 Apple Watch 上删除。
The iPhone uses local speech recognition and language models on-device to transcribe the audio and then generate a minimal version of the transcript that removes nonessential elements like extra words and repeated phrases. Then the raw audio is immediately deleted from the iPhone as well. The last step on the iPhone is a safety model that “screens the text to omit potentially harmful terms,” according to Apple. From there, the distillation of the conversation is encrypted, and the iPhone sends it out to Private Cloud Compute. iPhone 使用设备本地的语音识别和语言模型来转录音频，并生成一个精简版的文本，剔除多余词汇和重复短语等非必要元素。随后，原始音频也会立即从 iPhone 上删除。据苹果称，iPhone 上的最后一步是运行一个安全模型，“筛选文本以剔除潜在的有害词汇”。此后，对话的提炼内容会被加密，并由 iPhone 发送到“私有云计算”中。
“Contextual information is also sent to improve summary quality,” Apple says. “For example, Now Playing data helps the model understand that speech may have originated from music or a podcast. Calendar data can help generate accurate titles of summaries. High-level location labels such as home, work, and school, along with locality information such as city, state, and country, add context to the summarization. Point-of-interest categories like ‘grocery store’ or ‘park’ may also be included. Precise location and specific points of interest are not included.” “上下文信息也会被发送以提高摘要质量，”苹果表示。“例如，‘正在播放’（Now Playing）数据有助于模型理解语音可能来自音乐或播客。日历数据有助于生成准确的摘要标题。家庭、工作和学校等高级位置标签，以及城市、州和国家等地理位置信息，为摘要增加了背景信息。‘杂货店’或‘公园’等兴趣点类别也可能被包含在内。精确位置和具体的兴趣点则不会被包含。”
Finally, the condensed transcript is run through Apple’s foundation models in Private Cloud Compute to create a title and summary, which is then encrypted and sent back to the iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple says that Siri Recap is built to remove sensitive information like financial data, ID numbers, or other personal identifiers from its summaries. 最后，精简后的文本会通过“私有云计算”中的苹果基础模型进行处理，生成标题和摘要，随后加密并发送回 iPhone 和 Apple Watch。苹果表示，“Siri 摘要”在设计时就旨在从摘要中剔除财务数据、身份证号码或其他个人身份信息等敏感内容。
The Live Rewind features that lets users ask for a text version of the last 15 seconds of what was said in their environment uses the Secure Exclave buffer to continuously hold audio on a rolling basis, where old sound is replaced by new audio and doesn’t amass. To get a transcript through Live Rewind, users must double-press the Apple Watch’s Digital Crown each time. Once activated, the watch sends the last 15 seconds of buffered audio from its Secure Exclave to the Secure Exclave of the paired iPhone. If the iPhone is not available, the transfer will fail, and the audio will automatically be deleted. (Siri Recap has similar fail-safes if the transfer from the watch to the iPhone fails.) If the transfer goes through, the iPhone does on-device speech-recognition processing to make a transcript and then deletes the audio and sends the text back to the Apple Watch. Users read the transcript and then can discard it or save it in the Siri app. “实时回放”功能允许用户获取过去 15 秒环境对话的文本版本，它利用“安全隔离区”缓冲区以滚动方式持续保存音频，旧声音会被新音频覆盖，不会堆积。要通过“实时回放”获取转录文本，用户每次都必须双击 Apple Watch 的数码表冠。一旦激活，手表会将“安全隔离区”中缓存的最后 15 秒音频发送到已配对 iPhone 的“安全隔离区”。如果 iPhone 不可用，传输将失败，音频会自动删除。（如果从手表到 iPhone 的传输失败，Siri 摘要也有类似的故障保护机制。）如果传输成功，iPhone 会在设备端进行语音识别处理以生成文本，随后删除音频并将文本发送回 Apple Watch。用户阅读文本后，可以选择丢弃或将其保存在 Siri 应用中。
It’s hard to ignore that, in spite of all of these data protections, anyone wearing a new Apple Watch could be siccing “audio intelligence” on, say, your intimate vent session, private family update, or accidental slip-up about a secret. To try to mitigate blatant privacy violations, Apple says that the watch produces an audible chime when a watch owner initiates a Live Rewind transcript to alert others. 很难忽视的是，尽管有所有这些数据保护措施，任何佩戴新款 Apple Watch 的人都有可能对你的私密倾诉、家庭内部消息或无意中泄露的秘密使用“音频智能”。为了尽量减少公然侵犯隐私的行为，苹果表示，当手表所有者启动“实时回放”转录时，手表会发出可听见的提示音，以提醒周围的人。