iPhone users wearing headphones can now instantly translate conversations across more than 70 languages using Google Translate. Here’s how it works.

As Google announced today, Google Translate’s Live translate with headphones feature is officially arriving on iOS.

Here’s Sasha Kapur, Product Manager at Google Translate, on the news:

Google Translate’s Live translate with headphones is officially arriving on iOS! And we’re expanding the capability for both iOS and Android users to even more countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Thailand, and the U.K. Live translate helps you instantly understand and connect with the world right through any pair of headphones in 70+ languages

Kapur says that some of her favorite use cases for the feature are during family dinners with her relatives who chat in Punjabi, and getting around while traveling, which is also a common use case for Apple’s Live Translation with AirPods feature, which currently works with AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods Pro 3.

Google’s Live translate with headphones was launched late last year in beta, promising to “preserve the tone, emphasis and cadence of each speaker to create more natural translations and make it easier to follow along with who said what”.

The feature supported more than 70 languages form the start, including: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Bengali, Catalan, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Basque, Persian, Dari, Finnish, Filipino, French, Canadian French, Galician, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Croatian, Armenian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, Javanese, Georgian, Khmer, Kannada, Korean, Lao, Lithuanian, Latvian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mongolian, Marathi, Malay, Burmese, Nepali, Norwegian, Dutch, Punjabi, Punjabi Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbian, Sundanese, Swedish, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, and Zulu.

To try it, open the Google Translate app, tap Live translate (where available), then select Listening:

To learn more about today’s announcement, follow this link.

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