Google Translate Turns Your Earbuds Into A Real-Time Interpreter

In Star Trek, it took until the year 2151 for a functional universal translator to come into existence, but Google is leveraging Gemini to accelerate that timeline. The company is offering real-time speech-to-speech translation via Google Translate, using your existing phone's audio hardware. It's hard not to be critical of generative AI and its content and copyright abuses, but employing AI for real-world use-cases like live translation is great—and based on Google's demo, it seems to work quite well. Google Translate has already proven capable of translating text in real-time, and Search can even identify food and products in photographs, so this is a natural expansion of Gemini's feature set.

While there are bound to be errors and hiccups for various reasons (for example: translating audio in a crowded room, from a poor-quality mic, or both), technology like this is as impressive as it is ...