According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has a great track record for this sort of information, Apple is planning to update AirPods to offer live translation later this year.
The feature will come as part of iOS 19 and necessitate a firmware update for the AirPods, too. It’s unclear which AirPods models will work with the live translation feature. It is said that Apple is preparing AirPods Pro 3 for debut later this year, but that doesn’t mean it will be limited to that model.
If you speak English and someone talks to you in French, for example, your AirPods would send the audio to your iPhone where the Translate app would translate it in real time and send the resulting audio back to your AirPods. This is similar to how rival earbuds have worked for years—Google Buds have offered this feature since 2017, for example.
Gurman says that Apple is “bolstering the translation technology in iOS 19, beyond the new AirPods feature” without expounding further. It’s possible that Apple will make enhanced, on-device, real-time translation a fundamental feature of iOS that can be used in any app; translating YouTube or TikTok videos, for example. We expect to hear more about iOS 19’s translation features at WWDC in June.