Apple will supposedly give iOS 19 a big design overhaul this year, making the iPhone operating system look more like the visionOS than previous iOS releases.
A major design makeover might just be what Apple needs in light of its recent Apple Intelligence fiasco. The smart Siri assistant Apple promised last summer isn’t coming for at least a year. The best way to make iOS exciting is to give it a new coat of paint. At least that’s something ost iPhone users will care more about than AI features.
But Apple is also readying new features to go along with the redesign, and one interesting AirPods functionality has leaked. Apple plans to bring live translation support to AirPods via the iOS 19 upgrade, and the good news about it is that the feature should work with your existing AirPods.
Also, since I mentioned Apple Intelligence before, live translation is easily something Apple could sell under the iPhone’s AI umbrella of features. It wouldn’t be the only one.
Live Translate is one of the first Galaxy AI features that Samsung announced in late 2023. We learned that flagship phones would translate call conversations in real time, on-device, before we saw all the other tricks in the Galaxy AI suite of apps and features.
Samsung updated Live Translate before last summer’s Unpacked event to work on Galaxy phones with foldable displays. Regardless of phone form factor, you do not necessarily need earphones for Live Translate to work.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple included live translation in Apple Intelligence because translating live speech as it happens is actually a process that involves AI. Algorithms understand speech, convert it into text, and then translate and turn it back into voice.
We’ll have to wait for Apple to explain how live translation works in iOS 19, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has an example:
The capability will work like this: If an English speaker is hearing someone talk in Spanish, the iPhone will translate the speech and relay it to the user’s AirPods in English. The English speaker’s words, meanwhile, will be translated into Spanish and played back by the iPhone.
That’s a clever use of hardware for both parties in the conversation to be able to chat by voice in real time.
Given that the iPhone will do the actual translation, the feature should work with any existing AirPods model. It should also work with other wireless earphones, assuming Apple wants to expand support to AirPods rivals. But I think Apple would rather keep the feature as an AirPods-only functionality that helps the company further differentiate its earphones from competitors.
The report also notes that Apple is working on new AirPods hardware, including AirPods Pro 3 and a model with built-in cameras for Apple Intelligence.
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