The newest Apple Watches can name a song playing nearby without being asked, and Apple says the audio is not recorded or stored.
Hear a song in a cafe and wonder what it is? The newest Apple Watches can now tell you on their own. The music does not need to be playing on the watch. It only needs to be audible nearby. The watch listens, identifies the song, and shows the title and artist without you tapping anything.
The feature is called Music Recognition. It is part of iOS 27 and is one of Apple's new Audio Intelligence features. It uses Shazam, Apple's song-identifying service, to find the match. The answer appears in the Smart Stack, the screen of widgets you open by swiping up from the watch face or turning the Digital Crown upward.
Open the Smart Stack and look for the Music Recognition widget. It shows the song title and artist once it has a match, which Apple says should not take long. A tap lets you save the song to your Shazam history or your Apple Music library.
Older Apple Watch models can still name songs, but only manually, by opening the Music Recognition app. The automatic Smart Stack version is limited to the Series 12 and Ultra 4.
The first time the Music Recognition widget shows up in your Smart Stack, tap Enable Music Detection. The feature works from then on. If it does not start on its own after that step, the original report includes a manual way to turn it on in settings.
A watch that listens all the time raises an obvious question. Apple says no audio is recorded or stored. The sound is handled in a protected area inside the watch. Only an acoustic signature of the song, a kind of fingerprint, is sent to Shazam's servers. Apple says that signature cannot be turned back into the original audio.
The report does not say whether the feature costs anything extra or when iOS 27 will reach everyone. It also does not explain how often the watch listens. Those details matter if you are deciding whether a newer watch is worth it for this feature alone.
If you own an Apple Watch Series 12 or Ultra 4 with iOS 27, tap Enable Music Detection once and your watch will name nearby songs for you.
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