Apple has lately focused on giving the AirPods more of a wellness-focused makeover than hawking them as plain wireless earbuds. Late last year, the AirPods Pro 2 landed a Loud Sound Reduction feature, alongside a hearing test system and hearing aid facility.
Now, the company is reportedly eyeing a conversational upgrade for them. According to Bloomberg, Apple plans to bring a real-time translation facility to the AirPods later this year. The focus is on removing the language barrier for in-person conversations.
The feature is said to be in active development and might be rolled out via a software update later this year, tied to the iOS 19 bundle. It’s going to be a two-way translation system where the AirPods and iPhone play an equal role.
The iPhone will serve as the translation hub. It will translate language A into language B, sending the translated audio to the person wearing the Apple earbuds. Meanwhile, language B will be translated into language A, and the translated audio stream will be played via the iPhone’s speaker for the other person.
It is not clear what translation engine Apple is going to use, nor does the report mention whether it’s going to be an AI-assisted approach and how many languages the system will support. Either way, the facility is meaningful, but Apple won’t be the first to the market.
Google’s Pixel-branded wireless earbuds have offered this convenience for a while now. The company has relied on the Google Translate stack to allow translations in nearly four dozen languages. Users can pick between the live Conversation Mode for direct voice chat, or rely on the Transcribe Mode.
Aside from Google, numerous other brands have also jumped on the “translation earbuds” bandwagon. The Earfun AirPro 4+ earbuds, introduced earlier this year, also offer an AI-driven real-time translation trick. The Mymanu Click and Mars earbuds have been offering the perk since 2017.
There’s even a “translation earbuds” niche, where products such as the Timekettle X1 offer language translation convenience to business and enterprise customers. Meanwhile, AI chatbots such as Google’s Gemini also offer language translation facilities.
In Apple’s case, the company can go in either direction. The company already has a partnership in place with OpenAI, which puts ChatGPT in the driving seat for every occasion where Siri comes up short. Neural machine translation has also developed dramatically and there are multiple open-source models out there up for taking.
Meta, for example, open-sourced its AI-assisted translation tool that supports nearly 200 languages, all the way back in 2022. Yet, given Apple’s privacy-first approach, the company will either stick to a trusted partner or even deploy its own tech stack that can perform on-device translations, which is safer as well as quicker compared to a cloud-tethered format.
Next time you dive into Yelp to look for restaurants or other places to go, you might see some of your previously posted content turning up in the app
Samsung’s much-rumored smart glasses will enter the market in 2026 according to a new report, but the South Korean giant has just been beaten to marke
What’s happened? Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” told the Ai4 conference that making AI “submissive” is a losing strategy and propose
Imagine a tool that takes an image of whatever appears on your computer’s screen, saves it locally, and lets you access it all like a time machine. A
“Hey ChatGPT, left-click on the enter password field in the pop-up window appearing in the lower left quadrant of the screen and fill XUS&(#($J, a
Update: Google has responded to Digital Trends’ queries. The story has been updated with company’s statement below.The rise of generative AI has been
On February 4, Google updated its “AI principles,” a document detailing how the company would and wouldn’t use artificial intelligence in its products
We’re now into the third year of the AI boom, and industry leaders are showing no signs of slowing down, pushing out newer and (presumably) more capab
We are a comprehensive and trusted information platform dedicated to delivering high-quality content across a wide range of topics, including society, technology, business, health, culture, and entertainment.
From breaking news to in-depth reports, we adhere to the principles of accuracy and diverse perspectives, helping readers find clarity and reliability in today’s fast-paced information landscape.
Our goal is to be a dependable source of knowledge for every reader—making information not only accessible but truly trustworthy. Looking ahead, we will continue to enhance our content and services, connecting the world and delivering value.
