Apple announced several AI-powered upgrades to watchOS on Monday at its Apple Event 2024. Most of these were announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, but Apple revealed more details during its keynote this morning.
The Translator app will be coming to the latest version of watchOS, watchOS 11. Like other platforms, the Translator app will leverage AI for speech recognition and translation in various languages.
On the Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra, the translation feature also works without a phone connection, and according to Apple, these are the only Apple Watch models with enough storage to download the necessary language models, up to 20 models can be downloaded at a time.
Image credit: Apple
AI is also improving Smart Stack, a watchOS feature that uses contextual information to surface relevant widgets. Apple says Smart Stack will soon automatically add new widgets “when needed,” presumably based on factors like the time of day or your location.
As a final AI-powered enhancement, watchOS 11 introduces a new “Photos” watch face that uses machine learning to identify and curate photos from your library.
Details regarding offline translation were updated on September 7th at 4:47pm PST.