Apple’s new Live Translation with AirPods enables in-person communication across select languages and is available in beta. This hands-free capability is powered by computational audio and Apple Intelligence to help people easily connect — whether they’re traveling to a new place, collaborating at work or school, or simply catching up with the people who matter most. When enabled, Live Translation helps users understand another language and communicate with others by speaking naturally with AirPods. To interact with someone who doesn’t have this hands-free capability, there’s an option to use iPhone as a horizontal display, showing the live transcription of what the user is saying in the other person’s preferred language. When the other person responds, their speech is translated into the user’s preferred language with AirPods.
It’s even more useful for longer conversations when both users are wearing their own AirPods with Live Translation enabled from their iPhone. ANC on AirPods lowers the volume of the other person speaking so that it’s easier to focus on the translation while staying connected in the interaction.
Live Translation with AirPods works on AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation and AirPods Pro 2 and later with the latest firmware when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone running iOS 26 and later. Supports English (UK, U.S.), French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain). Later this year, Live Translation on AirPods and in Phone and FaceTime will add language support for Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified).
Brian X. Chen for The New York Times:
This week, I saw an old friend, and he caught me up on what he’d been up to over the summer. He and his girlfriend had visited family in Arizona. His niece dragged him to a screening of “Lilo and Stitch.” He was working hard at a new start-up. He said all of this in Spanish, a language I have never learned, but I followed every word.
I understood him because I was wearing the new Apple earbuds arriving in stores on Friday. The $250 AirPods Pro 3 use artificial intelligence to do real-time translations, their most significant new feature. (The earphones, which have slightly better noise cancellation, are otherwise not that different from the last iteration.) As my friend spoke, Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, acted as an interpreter, speaking in a robotic voice that immediately converted the Spanish words into English in my ears.
Later, I reviewed a transcript of the conversation produced on my iPhone to confirm the accuracy of the translation. With the exception of a few mistakes where Siri mixed up pronouns (referring to my friend’s girlfriend as a “he” instead of a “she”), it was solid.
I was impressed. This was the strongest example I had seen of A.I. technology working in a seamless, practical way that could be beneficial for lots of people. Children of immigrants who prefer to speak their native tongue may have an easier time communicating. Travelers visiting foreign countries may better understand cabdrivers, hotel staff and airline employees.
It would also help me in my day-to-day life with understanding a contractor or pest control employee who doesn’t speak English and is trying to explain what he found under my house.
And frankly, I was also surprised. Apple’s foray into generative A.I., the technology driving chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, has been rocky, to say the least. The company never finished releasing some of the A.I. features it promised for last year’s iPhone 16 because the technology didn’t work well. And Apple’s A.I. tools that are available for photo editing and summarizing articles have been disappointing compared with similar tools from Google.
The robust translation technology in the AirPods is a sign that Apple is still in the A.I. race, despite its early stumbles. Digital language translators are not new, but Apple’s execution of the feature with the AirPods, a product that perfectly fits in your ears, should make a profound difference in how often people use the technology.
MacDailyNews Take: Live Translation with AirPods is a transformative technology.
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