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
Introducing the all new Apple AirBabel with Apple Intelligence.
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.
I have some buds that do this and you have the ability to download languages for offline use and those work just fine.
Apple could do the same. They may not, but this is one of those features that needs offline use more than others. Some remote village where no cell towers exist, underground where no cell towers or satellite can penetrate and no WiFi exists, indoors where cell towers are difficult to penetrate and WiFi is not always an option…
Hopefully they will.
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.
There’s no way airpods have the power or compute to do that (anytime soon). It’ll be via phone or mac.
They’ll probably use it as a way to sell the iPhone 17, claiming previous iPhones don’t have the necessary computing power, but the new processor does!!
I am waiting for the next generation AirPods Pro with better call quality.
That’s already arriving with iOS26 and the AirPods Pro new firmware. The A/B results from it are outstanding. No need for new hardware (for once).
That’s good to know.
The AirPods Pro gen2 was released nearly 3 years ago. I’m not sure if it is the right time for me to buy one now, or wait for the next gen.
