One of the biggest features of the newly-unveiled AirPods Pro 3, (an addition totally unexpected, judging by the reaction in Team TechRadar when Apple showed it off at the 2025 Apple Event,) was a new live translation coming to the the buds – and to some older AirPods too.
This feature, if Apple’s presentation is to be believed, will let you waltz into a foreign night market and converse fluently with locals; your AirPods will hear what people say to you and automatically translate it, and when you talk they’ll send a translation to your iPhone that you can show to someone (as in the picture above).
Supported at launch are English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish languages, but Apple has pledged that Italian, Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese will be rolled out by the end of the year. As with many Apple products, exact availability depends on where you live, and a surprising note in Apple’s documentation points out that Live Translation doesn’t work in the EU, for the 450 million residents of the bloc.
It’s worth noting that AirPods Pro 3 aren’t the first earbuds to have such a feature, with Google’s Pixel Buds lineup offering it as well as the recent Galaxy Buds 3 FE and plenty of bespoke translation headphones – Viaim’s RecDot, which also offer transcription of meetings being one we’ve recently reviewed.
Earlier this year I also tested the Honor Earbuds Open that came with a similar feature (admittedly one that’s officially only available for Honor phone users, though it worked on my non-Honor phone anyway).
While my testing budget doesn’t cover foreign holidays, I tested this feature by watching some international TV with the buds in, to see how they fared. And I wasn’t impressed, for reasons that Apple can’t really fix.
Technical shortcomings
If you’ve ever used a text-to-speech program, you know that they’re not instant; there’s a little bit of awkward processing time for your spoken words to appear as written text. And that’s going to be doubly true of a live translation feature, which also needs to configure said text from one language to another.
Compare that to spoken conversation – when was the last time you had a chat in which the other person paused for a second after every word? Never, because conversation is quick and idiosyncratic. And that’s coming from an English-speaker; my native language is one of the slowest and most plodding of the lot!
When I tested the Honor buds, I quickly found myself falling behind conversation, as tech simply can’t keep up with actual human speech – watch someone try to communicate with Siri if this isn’t already abundantly clear to you.
There quickly became a dissonance between what was being said and what I was hearing as I got further and further behind the speech, and sometimes it’d skip words too. Thankfully, I didn’t need to respond, so I could pause my show to let the translation catch up, but this isn’t something you can do if you’re talking to a real human.
This isn’t a criticism of the Honor buds, just an observation that tech simply can’t match humanity here – not yet, anyway. I don’t imagine the AirPods Pro 3 (or AirPods Pro 2, or AirPods 4 with ANC, because the feature is also listed as rolling out to those sets too) will fare better, unless they can read the mind of the person talking to you.
I also found it very disconcerting hearing what was being said in the foreign language, and in English, at the same time. The Honor Earbuds Open are admittedly open earbuds so will naturally let sound through more than the AirPods Pro 3 would, but you’re going to be hearing a little bit of chat and seeing someone’s lips move, so it’s still likely to be a little jarring.
And one other issue. Put yourself in the shoes of the star of Apple’s Live Translation segment; you’re walking onto the set of an Apple TV Plus show – sorry, I mean a lovely night market on vacation – to peruse the wares. While Apple’s star had no trouble finding a vendor with which they could chat at a nice indoor volume, that’s simply not how these things play out in real life.
If you’ve been to any indoor or outdoor market, you’ll know that they’re loud, with hundreds of people around you talking over each other… and possibly talking over the one vendor you want to chat with. So how do translation headphones know what to translate?
In my testing, the Honor buds could easily translate a TV show where one person was talking at a time… until I pushed it. I put another show on another device, sometimes at a lower volume and sometimes at a distance, in a bid to recreate a natural use case environment (although in real life, there’d be far more phones playing snippets of shows).
As you can guess, the translation just couldn’t keep up with what was going on around it. And I see no reason that the AirPods Pro 3 will fare any better in real-world environments, beyond Apple’s fantasy scenarios like the one it showed in its showcase.
Beyond technical
So there are theoretical technical limitations with the AirPods Pro 3’s live translation mode (if it’s not clear, I haven’t tested it yet). But there are other reasons too that this isn’t a new feature we should be celebrating.
You go to new countries to experience new cultures and take in those sensory details, and sound is one of the most important senses when it comes to how we understand and perceive the world. Some of my most memorable travel experiences are hearing calls to prayer in Istanbul, or distant waterfalls in the Australian outback, or the cacophony of sounds of New Year’s street fairs in Romania.
So should Apple really be encouraging people to go on holiday with noise cancelling AirPods perpetually stuck in their ears? Does that really fit with the multicultural image Apple tries to sell in these presentations; ‘ignore foreign cultures, we’ll tell you what you need to know’?
It’s worth noting that Apple isn’t pitching these as handy communication tools with which you can commune with your elderly neighbor from the other side of the world. Its showcase saw someone in another country go shopping in a market – that’s the selling point.
I know a few people who go through life, AirPods constantly in ear. You might know a few of these people too. They’ll have whole conversations with you, clearly not listening to music and with Transparency mode on, but blissfully unaware of just how rude it is to talk to someone while you’ve got headphones in.
Admittedly, this is coming from someone who removes their headphones for the single second it takes to greet a bus driver, but it’s hard to deny how unseemly it is for people to wear earbuds in social settings (other than for genuine accessibility reasons, of course. I’m aware earbuds can double as hearing aids these days, but people with this consideration are usually polite enough to explain why they’re wearing earbuds in conversation).
I could spend thousands of words complaining about the way that tech pushes a dehumanizing attitude to others, ‘you’re not a person, just a break from my music’, especially when it comes to my pet peeve: patrons of cafes, shops or bars who don’t stop listening to speak to a cashier or server, viewing this service employee as unworthy of a break in their music. But a more dangerous edge joins the proceedings when you add translation features.
As well as sound being useful to appreciate the cultures of foreign lands, it’s also vital as a safety measure. Not only are tourists notoriously top prey for unscrupulous individuals in any country, but it’s important to be able to hear what’s going on around you. I regularly cycle through central London and I’ve been in countless near misses with tourists who don’t know which way to look before crossing the road (or, more accurately, just don’t look, even when they’ve got a red light and I a green one). And if those tourists were wearing noise cancelling headphones and couldn’t hear my yelps? It’s a recipe for disaster. This also goes for public transport announcements, emergency vehicle sirens or yelps of ‘get out of the road!’. You need to hear things when you’re in an unfamiliar place. There’s a reason most marathon events around the world now ban the use of headphones.
I can’t really blame Apple for the degradation of human society and the way headphones make us closed off from the world around us, but I do wonder if it could be introducing more useful features to its AirPods than ones which encourage you to use them more. At least the IP rating improvement means they’ll break less – and the battery life means they’d probably last a marathon, if I were to wear them…
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tom.bedford@futurenet.com (Tom Bedford)
