Prior to the launch of iOS 26, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said that the AirPods would get a translate feature for translating in-person conversations, and it looks like Apple is working on introducing it soon.
that’s gonna be so so great, to be honest
Yeah, something tells me that’s gonna need a persistent internet connection.
If it has to be live (i.e. works in real-time), doing the translation in a server elsewhere is probably a bad idea due to the latency.
It makes more sense to run an optimised translation model locally - ideally in the AirPods directly but if not, on the connected iPhone.
I don’t have Apple products but I’ve been saying this is a feature I expected them to beat everyone else to. Honestly I thought we were going to see something like this back in 2023. I assumed it was going to require the newest iPhone, airpods, and an Apple AI subscription but if it works as well as Apple products tend to then I bet this will be incredible. Tapping your phone to someone else’s, putting in some headphones and just talking in your own languages has been a sci-fi dream since the 40s. Combined with live translation of text you can already do in Apple Vision Pro, language barriers are going to start melting away
