As iOS 26 worms its way through a public beta (that you can join), eagle-eyed enthusiasts and journalists work to extract clues to see what’s on the horizon for us when the public release of the new operating system lands this fall.
Bloomberg called it earlier this year when they said that live, in-ear translation was coming to the AirPods, even though Apple hasn’t said a word (in any language) about it, and now we seem to have a bit of evidence that it’s real and coming.
9to5Mac spotted a system asset in the iOS 26 developer beta 6 that seems to show that pressing the stems on both AirPods triggers a translation feature in English, French, German, and Portuguese. It’s a feature within the iOS operating system because the translating will almost certainly happen on the device (in this case, iPhone) linked to your AirPods, rather than on the AirPods themselves.
will it work well enough?
Remember those Lonely Planet phrasebooks for picking up foreign languages? They weren’t bad for their time. But for anybody who’s ever stood under a highway overpass in Cairo at night, flipping through a bunch of tiny pages to piece together a sentence (ahem), Google Translate was a very welcome invention.
But it’s still a stilted way of communicating. Speaking into a phone back and forth doesn’t always work so well. Neither does passing the phone between two or more people. It’ll get the job done, but it removes a lot of the humanity from conversation.
In-ear translation is obviously the way forward, but aside from the now-discontinued Waverly Labs Ambassador, there hasn’t been much in the way of anything affordable and convenient to regular folks.
But Apple’s AirPods line of earbuds are accessible, popular, and multi-purpose enough that most regular folks who’d only own one pair of in-ear devices would pick up a pair.
Given how my attempts with Google Translate in Egyptian Arabic (and Russian, and Czech, and Vietnamese…) fell down enough to be frustrating, I wonder if Apple’s attempt will do any better.
The iOS 26 update, along with the translation functionality, will land on the AirPods Pro 2 and both the ANC (active noise cancellation) and non-ANC versions of the AirPods 4. If you’re having trouble deciding which to get, check out my comparison article for a breakdown in their differences.
The post Your AirPods Basically Just Became Universal Translators appeared first on VICE.
