Apple Is Bringing Live Translation to Messages, FaceTime, and Your Phone Calls

At WWDC today, Apple announced an extremely welcome feature for anyone who's ever been frustrated with not knowing every language on Earth (like me). Live Translation will translate between many languages, and it will work directly inside Messages, FaceTime, and even during your calls through the Phone app.

This feature looks similar to comparable features on Google's Pixel phones, which is great, because crossing the language barrier shouldn't be platform-specific. Live Translate can also translate messages you're writing as you write them, into the recipient's language. Their responses will then be translated to your language on the way back. Technically, you could translate messages before, but you had to long press them first.

In FaceTime calls, those translations will take the form of live captions you can read on your screen, while you listen to the speaker. On pure phone calls, you'll receive translations spoken aloud. These might be a little more difficult to pay attention to, since you'll also be hearing the raw audio from the person you're speaking to, so we'll have to wait and see how Apple manages volume levels between the person you're talking to and the voiceover. On the plus side, translations in phone calls will also still be displayed on screen, so you'll be able to see them if you're on speaker and don't need to hold the phone up to the side of your face.

As with most of Apple's AI-powered features, the company is touting this as all running on your device, to avoid having all your conversations run through some random server somewhere.