Duolingo’s green owl may be coming up with a lot of foreign words for ‚exasperation‘ right now.
Don’t miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google.
Google Translate may have started out as a glorified digital dictionary, but it’s grown into an increasingly capable interpreter. With the help of AI, it’s now ready to serve as a tutor with new live translation and language-lesson features built on the Gemini platform.
The first, as shown off in a preview call for journalists on Monday, seems a considerable step up in usefulness from the “Conversation” mode in the current app. Instead of the app listening to somebody else’s speech and displaying a translation you can then play back as audio, the new “Live Translate” mode does this in near real time, alternating automatically between parties in a conversation to speak each one’s words in the other’s language.
It evokes the live translation mode that Google demoed in Google Meet at its I/O developer conference in May, except that one requires a subscription while this one is free with Translate, at least for now. It will, however, require a connection (which, if you have an unlocked phone, will be cheaper internationally with the right eSIM).
Google says this feature supports more than 70 languages—fewer than the 251 total, including regional and national dialects, that this app supports after a series of linguistic expansions.
