Photo Credit: Apple
Apple adds Shazam to its controversial new Audio Intelligence feature on Apple Watch, enabling music detection that rivals Google Pixel’s Now Playing.
Apple is finally rolling out a feature that Google Pixel users have already been enjoying for years: instant song detection. But it’s not coming to the iPhone; instead, it’s making use of the Apple Watch’s new Audio Intelligence—a controversial always-on AI-based audio detection that users (crucially) must opt into.
The news arrived the night before Apple’s major launch event, where it unveiled the new iPhone 18 Pro line. Enabled by the new S11 chip on the newest Apple Watch models, Audio Intelligence comprises four features: Siri Recap, creating high-level summaries of conversations during your day; Live Rewind, transcribing the previous 15 seconds of a conversation to text; Music Recognition, which utilizes Shazam; and Sound Recognition, which can identify the source of sounds like alarms or sirens.
All four of these features are being presented as opt-in, and all four use artificial intelligence coupled with always-on microphones. Even though these are features that a user must consciously choose to enable, their mere existence is already raising understandable privacy concerns.
Apple released a whole document outlining the safeguards in place, such as a “Secure Enclave” on the S11 chip inside the latest watch models—a dedicated secure buffer on the chip that processes audio privately and separately from the rest of the system. It works without creating a recording of the ambient sound around you while keeping that data isolated. The Secure Enclave pairs with your iPhone using a “new audio-verified pairing mechanism that exists in addition to Bluetooth pairing.”
Regardless, any device that is constantly gathering data around it will undoubtedly be considered a potential security risk, especially in regulated environments such as certain tech or financial industries.
It’s worth pointing out that Google’s Now Playing feature, which first rolled out in 2017 with the launch of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, doesn’t require an always-on connection or to be constantly listening in the background. The feature works passively in the background, entirely on-device, using a small, periodically updated database of locally stored song fingerprints. That’s vastly different from the way Shazam works, which requires an active internet connection and uploads a snippet of what it hears to identify a track.
For the average user, that means you can more readily identify a track in places like a noisy bar using Google’s Now Playing, whereas Shazam would have more difficulty cutting through the ambient sound to pick up the track you’re asking it to identify. But particularly from a privacy standpoint, there’s simply no contest between the two features.
