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Live Translation Coming to AirPods
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Regarding: "With the option on, your music will continue playing in your AirPods when you get in the car. You can turn it on in iOS 26 by going to Settings > General > AirPlay and Continuity." Wearing headphone while driving is illegal in some states. I would hope the headphones are automatically put into transparent mode so the driver can hear emergency sirens. Does CarPlay automatically displace that on the screen?
Be mindful of that. Best efforts to translate a language you don't know to a language you do know is a pretty solid use case for these devices... but what you're describing here -- translating a language you do know into a language you don't know -- probably isn't going to work quite as well; we all know that computer translations always introduce a certain amount of error, and we can usually recognize an error in translation when things simply... don't quite sound right. But if you don't know what the errors are... you're setting yourself up for some potentially embarrassing mistakes, at best.
This feature sounds fantastic; however its success will depend on two critical elements: accuracy and speed.
My expectations are tempered. I understand it might take two or three generations to fully realize the vision in a truly useful and meaningful way. Will be truly game changing technology once this happens!
My expectations are tempered. I understand it might take two or three generations to fully realize the vision in a truly useful and meaningful way. Will be truly game changing technology once this happens!
It can be done with the phone and reasonably well.
BUT
The big problem with the phone today is that it doesn't work well in far field. Lectures, tour guides, even meetings do not work well. I think this is because the mics (or the 1st stage of the model that takes in the mic input) aren't tuned appropriately.
I'm guessing THAT (mic tuning for far field) is the real tech behind offering this, and hopefully it will also make the phone version of this service work better. (And, in a perfect world, also improve CarPlay Siri. The main reason CarPlay Siri often feels so lousy is that CarPlay uses whatever mic the car has built in which is often, uh, let's just say not-leading-edge mic technology...)
Several technical things:
- Most likely 1) AirPods have to be connected to the phone and phone has to have good data connection through Cellular/wifi
- How do they recognize which language is spoken? What if multiple languages are spoken at the same time in the same area? (I mean they can preset it in the translation app)
- It doesn't work if it's a conversation if the other party doesn't understand what you are saying since they don't have the feature. This feature works well for meetings and big events where you are just listening.
- Most likely 1) AirPods have to be connected to the phone and phone has to have good data connection through Cellular/wifi
- How do they recognize which language is spoken? What if multiple languages are spoken at the same time in the same area? (I mean they can preset it in the translation app)
- It doesn't work if it's a conversation if the other party doesn't understand what you are saying since they don't have the feature. This feature works well for meetings and big events where you are just listening.
Apple already offers pretty good translation ON-DEVICE (no internet necessary).
I'm constantly amazed at the things Apple has offered for years of which people are utterly unaware.
Play with the Apple Translation app to get a feel for what already exists.
(Be aware that if you want, say, Chinese <-> English translation, you need to download BOTH languages for on-device translation. Many people just download Chinese, then don't understand why on-device doesn't work. Yes, this is kinda dumb as a non-obvious UI issue, and maybe at some point Apple will fix it.)
Grok can already translate between English and Russian using the Grok iOS app. Just tell Grok to go in translation mode and tell it to live translate between English and Russian. I tested it a few days ago. I bought a $30/month subscription that I use mostly for coding for work.
You obviously don’t understand. I get the translation in the AirPods and the iPhone on speaker translates to Spanish.
