Google has just announced the arrival of headphone translation on the iOS application. A direct offensive against Apple which, until now, reserved this exclusivity for owners of AirPods.
Google has just placed a giant foot on Apple’s playing field. Until now, if you wanted to translate a live conversation with your headphones on an iPhone, you had to go through “homemade” solutions and have AirPods 4 or AirPods Pro.
It is now finished. The Google Translate app is officially rolling out its live translation feature to all iOS users, regardless of your headset brand.
Google wants to turn your headphones into a universal interpreter. The function, called Live translate with headphonessort of this phase will be released until 2025 for download in the final version.
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France is one of the first countries served, alongside Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.
70 languages and a dose of naturalness
The strong point of this update lies in its catalog. Google immediately offers more than 70 languages. There we find the classics like English, Spanish or French, but also more specific languages like Punjabi, Kannada or Zulu. To activate it, simply open the app, tap the live translation option and select “Listen” mode.
But beyond the simple dictionary, it’s the technology behind it that impresses. Google claims to have worked on preserving the tone, emphasis and cadence of each speaker.
The idea is to avoid this monotonous robotic voice which made discussions difficult. The AI tries to transcribe the emotion of your interlocutor directly into your ears, which radically changes the dynamic of a real conversation.
For its part, Apple locks its users into an ecosystem: to have a good live translation, you need headphones with a chip H2.
Google doesn’t care. Whether you have Bose headphones, Sony earbuds or even cheap wired in-ears, the magic happens through the app.
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