Apple’s headline-dominating demo of Live Translation on AirPods Pro 3 wasn’t everything. The feature is also coming to AirPods Pro 2 and the noise-canceling version of AirPods 4. The catch: it only happens when those earbuds are connected to an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, a potentially prohibitive gate for a lot of existing AirPod owners.
Which AirPods Work — and What You Need
Apple mentions in its press materials that Live Translation will work on second-gen AirPods Pro and newer, as well as the Active Noise Cancellation version of AirPods 4, if they’re running the latest firmware. But compatibility also depends on the phone. You will need an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone with iOS 15, which Apple says includes the iPhone 15 Pro and newer models. In other words: Your earbuds might be up for it, but your iPhone might not.
This is a strategic split. It lets Apple show off a marquee feature on aging AirPods hardware — good news for people who don’t want to buy new buds each year — even as it pushes its ecosystem closer to its latest iPhones, home to Apple Intelligence features.
What Live Translation Looks Like in Practice
You tap one earbud to start, when paired with compatible AirPods and iPhone. Your iPhone detects what language the other speaker is talking and for a moment lowers the volume in your ears of whatever is being said and then translates their words in a language of your choice. You respond in speaking, speaking as you would otherwise; your translation then displays on your iPhone for rapid show-and-tell or you can read it aloud.
If both users have the necessary AirPods and iPhones, the feature allows you to carry on a continuous conversation that doesn’t require you to keep swapping the phone back and forth. Essentially, it is a two-way interpreter who resides in your ear and on your lock screen.
Available Languages and Next Steps
Apple is launching Live Translation in beta with English (US, UK), French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish (Spain). The company says Italian, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese are on the roadmap, as well as support for live-translated phone calls in its Phone app and on FaceTime.
That’s a thin slice of the world’s languages — Ethnologue lists more than 7,000 — but it covers a lot of travel and business interaction. Expect Apple to provide more dialects and regions as models gets better and more users provide feedback on edge cases.
Why It’s Connected to Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence is the technical and marketing line that offers the explanation of the limitation. Real-time speech recognition, translation, and synthesis require a significant amount of computation. Apple has promoted on-device processing for speed and privacy; its most recent Neural Engines are tailored to crunch these workloads with low latency and little battery drain. By limiting Live Translation to Apple Intelligence phones, it makes those restrictions, and the performance that provides, practical in the real world—less lag, less dropping out, less chance of losing yourself in translation via some suspiciously dispatched speech to the cloud.
There is also a business dimension: big features sell new iPhones. Offering Live Translation to current AirPods owners takes some of the sting out, while blocking off the phone upgrade path remains unobstructed.
How It Compares With Rivals
Apple isn’t first here. Google’s Pixel phones have had Interpreter mode and on-device Live Translate for a few years, and Samsung’s recent Galaxy phones have added call translation capabilities under the Galaxy AI brand. Apple’s edge is the tight hardware-software integration with AirPods; touching to activate translation and automatic volume ducking feel native, not tacked on.
Where Apple still has something to prove is call translation and wider language support. Google and Samsung have both publicly demonstrated call scenarios; Apple says it’s on the way. Now the race is less who can translate and more who can do it quickly, reliably and with the least friction across wearables and phones.
Real Life Use: Travel, Service and Accessibility
In noisy, bustling environments — airports, outdoor street markets, sports stadiums — AirPods’ Active Noise Cancellation comes in handy. Decreased ambient noise increases the accuracy of transcriptions, resulting in fewer cascading errors in translation. For travelers, a fast double-tap to cover it up in a basic language divide feels more convenient than passing around a phone mic in a crowd.
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The Fine Print: Beta Is Beta
Live Translation, Apple calls it beta. Be prepared for the occasional misfire in idioms, in names, in what one character is saying when another speaks over him. Accents, background sounds and also quick back-and-forths can still trip up even those state-of-the-art systems. For enterprises considering this for on-the-ground workers, they should first pilot it, and establish clear expectations.
Bottom Line: Good News, With a Gate
Live Translation isn’t AirPods Pro 3-exclusive, which is good news if you have Pro 2 headphones or are waiting to pick up AirPods 4 with ANC. But the real lock-in of the feature is its iPhone requirement: If your phone doesn’t have Apple Intelligence, you’re locked out of the fun. That’s the deal-breaker for a lot of people — your earbuds might be fluent, but your phone has to be as well.
