Apple's New AirPods Pro 3: A Breakthrough in Real-Time Language Translation

Apple's New AirPods Offer Impressive Language Translation

Brian X. Chen is The Times's lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use. This week, I saw an old friend, and he caught me up on what he'd been up to over the summer. He and his girlfriend had visited family in Arizona. His niece dragged him to a screening of "Lilo and Stitch." He was working hard at a new start-up. He said all of this in Spanish, a language I have never learned, but I followed every word. I understood him because I was wearing the new Apple earbuds arriving in stores on Friday. The $250 AirPods Pro 3 use artificial intelligence to do real-time translations, their most significant new feature. (The earphones, which have slightly better noise cancellation, are otherwise not that different from the last iteration.) As my friend spoke, Apple's virtual assistant, Siri, acted as an interpreter, speaking in a robotic voice that immediately converted the Spanish words into English in my ears. Later, I reviewed a transcript of the conversation produced on my iPhone to confirm the accuracy of the translation. With the exception of a few mistakes where Siri mixed up pronouns (referring to my friend's girlfriend as a "he" instead of a "she"), it was solid. I was impressed. This was the strongest example I had seen of A.I. technology working in a seamless, practical way that could be beneficial for lots of people. Children of immigrants who prefer to speak their native tongue may have an easier time communicating. Travelers visiting foreign countries may better understand cabdrivers, hotel staff and airline employees. It would also help me in my day-to-day life with understanding a contractor or pest control employee who doesn't speak English and is trying to explain what he found under my house. And frankly, I was also surprised. Apple's foray into generative A.I., the technology driving chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has been rocky, to say the least. The company never finished releasing some of the A.I. features it promised for last year's iPhone 16 because the technology didn't work well. And Apple's A.I. tools that are available for photo editing and summarizing articles have been disappointing compared with similar tools from Google.

The new AirPods can translate languages in your ears. This is profound

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. This week, I saw an old friend, and he caught me up on what he'd been up to over the summer. He and his girlfriend had visited family in Arizona. His niece dragged him to a screening of Lilo and Stitch. He was working hard at a new startup. He said all of this in Spanish, a language I have never learned, but I followed every word. I understood him because I was wearing the new Apple earbuds. The $US250 ($378) AirPods Pro 3 use artificial intelligence to do real-time translations, their most significant new feature.