Apple, Google, and Meta are leveraging AI advancements to introduce new translation features in their latest devices. Apple’s AirPods Pro 3, unveiled Tuesday, highlight Live Translation as a major feature, with the $250 earbuds hitting stores next week. Real-time language translation is becoming a critical focus in tech as AI reaches the speed of human speech.
For decades, shows like “Star Trek” and novels like “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” have showcased fictional universal translators, capable of seamlessly converting any language into English and vice versa.
Now, those gadgets once limited to works of science fiction are inching close to reality.
During its iPhone unveiling event on Tuesday, Apple included a video of many travelers’ dream scenario. It showed an English-speaking tourist buying flowers in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country. The florist addressed the tourist in Spanish, but what the tourist heard was in clear, coherent English.
“Today all the red carnations are 50% off,” the tourist heard in English in her headphones, at essentially the same time that the clerk was speaking.
The video was marketing material for Apple’s latest AirPods Pro 3, but the feature is one of many of its kind coming from tech companies that also include Google parent Alphabet and Meta, which makes Facebook and Instagram.
For Apple, Live Translation is a key selling point for the AirPods Pro 3, which the company unveiled on Tuesday. The new $250 earbuds go on sale next week, and with Live Translation, users will be able to immediately hear French, German, Portuguese and Spanish translated to English. Live Translation will also arrive as an update to AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2 on Monday.
And when two people are speaking to each other wearing AirPods, the conversation can be translated both ways simultaneously inside each user’s headphones. In Apple’s video demo, it looked like two people talking to each other in different languages.
MacDailyNews Note: For those who haven’t seen it, here’s that video (AirPods Pro 3 section starts at the 5:00 mark):
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