Apple just announced AirPods Pro 3 (along with lots of other things -read everything Apple announced at its iPhone 17 event here) and as part of the message showed a new live translation feature.
This takes the speech from someone who speaks to you in another language and converts it to your own language in your ears through your AirPods. You can talk back and your iPhone shows what you say in their language. If two people both use AirPods, you can just talk and have the whole conversation translated.
Here is Apple’s Demo of Live Translation:
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Now you can assume (as I initially did) that this is an AirPods Pro 3 exclusive, as Apple does not mention what comes to other earplugs – but it is not. Apple’s language is ambiguous under the section, and looks at the comparison pages for different AirPods models after the event reveals that more models get this feature.
Specifically, AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 with the ANC get it. This makes sense – they both use the same H2 chip as AirPods Pro 3, and both have active noise cancellation so the buds can put the person’s speech in your ears and fill the translation instead.
The cheapest AirPods 4 have the H2 chip but do not have active noise reduction so they will miss the feature. And AirPods Max has the older H1 chip, so miss this along with so many other features -including other new AirPods features advertised for iOS 26.
Apple says “Live Translation with AirPods Works on AirPods 4 with active noise reduction and AirPods Pro 2 and later with the latest firmware when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone running iOS 26 and later.”
As for the languages supported by live translation, Apple says: “Live translation on AirPods is available in English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and comes to four languages by the end of the year: Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (simplified).”
If you want to see a full overview of how all the different AirPods models are compared to features, here’s a big ol ‘list.
