Imagine talking to a stranger, but instead of a robotic voice from your mobile phone, you hear a fluent translation directly in your earpiece. Moreover, with the intonation and voice timbre of the original speaker. Google translator has just launched a technology that will definitively break down language barriers. Machine translation at Google is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, and the company boasts that its products now translate over a trillion words per month. New audio Model Gemini 3.5 Live Translate aims to take the entire discipline to the next level. Forget the traditional text translation and the awkward concept of having to say a sentence, wait for it to be processed, and then play the result. Google is moving towards seamless simultaneous interpreting, the kind we know from professionals.
The new model can translate spoken language in virtually real time, in more than 70 languages. Unlike older solutions, it does not wait for the speaker to finish speaking. It translates continuously, staying behind the speaker for just a few seconds, while maintaining their intonation, pace, and pitch. The resulting translation simply sounds like the original speaker. The key innovation is continuous speech generation. The model constantly intelligently balances whether to wait for additional context (and thus improve the quality of the translation) or translate immediately and keep up with the speaker. The result is fluent speech without unnatural pauses. In addition, there is no need to manually set the language. The model detects over 70 languages on its own and can easily cope with multilingual conversations or noisy environments.
In the new “listening mode”, you simply hold the phone to your ear, as if you were talking to someone on the phone. You can then hear the translation discreetly directly from the phone’s receiver, which completely changes the dynamics of personal communication in a foreign environment. No more holding your hand with the display in front of a stranger’s face. The new feature will gradually be introduced in video calls in Google Meet. Speech translation will arrive there first as part of private testing for select Google Workspace business customers, with Google promising wider deployment later this year. The model is available to developers via Gemini Live API. Among the first to test it is, for example, the Asian transport platform Grab for communication between drivers and passengers - over 10 million voice calls are made monthly through its application alone. The platform's management mainly praises the automatic language detection and extremely low latency.
Technology that can speak a foreign language in your own voice is, of course, a double-edged sword. To prevent the spread of deepfakes and disinformation, all audio generated by the model carries an inaudible digital watermark called SynthID. This allows for reliable AI content recognition in the future. With this step, Google is significantly strengthening its competitive edge. Apple recently bet on live translation in AirPodech and Samsung are massively pushing their AI interpreter directly into their phones Galaxy. However, the new product from Google works perfectly with Czech and Slovak, and the translation quality is top-notch according to our first tests. Manufacturers of single-purpose hardware translators will have an increasingly difficult time.
How to activate the function immediately?
- Update the Google Translate app in the app store (Google Play / App Store).
- After opening the application, tap the "Conversations" icon.
- Select the new item "Listening" and click "Start".
- Put the phone to your ear and start listening.chat surroundings.
According to our first editorial tests, the feature works very reliably and imitates the voices of the original speakers surprisingly faithfully. What do you think of this sci-fi novelty? Share with us in the discussion.
And in this world Siri doesn't speak Czech. Sad
I agree, it's ridiculous.
And Pixel who just laughs
I tried a South Korean movie in its original language. It felt like I was back in the days of videotapes and fast dubbing.
And how did you manage to get it to work? I see the offer there but I can't click on it (it's greyed out like in the picture in the article). Thank you for any advice 😉👍🏻
Probably because you didn't have your headphones plugged in. And make sure the app is up to date, it wasn't there on the old iPad and it is after the update.
And whether you understood the content or not, that's what matters, free and immediately, and you understand. Perfection is not free.
That's just it... It translated the words, it somehow fit with the subtitles, but focusing on a different voice, well, it wasn't quite the same. Rather, let everyone try it for themselves and judge. It will develop over time. For example, Netflix and others will make some API available/create an interpreting AI.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but the menu is there, but I can't select it 🤷♂️ it's "grayed out" just like in the pictures in the article, so I don't know? Is it available or not?!
I'm testing it and it's failing a lot while playing Far Cry 6, sometimes it won't translate anything, sometimes it'll say it in a minute and sometimes it'll cut out and repeat one word 30 times, which is crazy. But I understand that there's music and effects, I'd have to mute everything and notchat just a voice, which would be boring. But on YouTube, where one person speaks clearly and is not drowned out by music, the result is quite good.
It didn't really work for me, but I only tried it for a moment.
But what would be good if it picked up the sound from the phone. I was expecting a call from Austria and my German is terrible. Luckily a Czech called and translated it for the foreigners. The instructions to play the phone out loud and then the translator don't work, the phone is apparently set to ignore the sound from the phone (it's a technical issue, it causes a whistling or echo).