- Signs of support for XR glasses have been spotted in Google Translate
- The feature would send live translations right into your ears
- Samsung and Google are getting ready to release new XR hardware
The Samsung Galaxy XR (Extended Reality) headset is now official, but we know that smart XR glasses are also on the way from Samsung and Google – and it looks like Google Translate could be one of the killer apps for the upcoming hardware.
As discovered by Android Authority, the code hidden in the latest version of Google Translate for Android mentions “Glasses” as one of the devices through which you can stream spoken translations, in addition to headphones and the phone’s speaker.
The feature is not yet enabled in the app, but is closely tied to the Live Translation functionality that started rolling out in August. It seems clear that this will eventually be added to the upcoming Android-powered XR glasses.
We’ll have to wait and see exactly how it works in practice, but the idea would be that you could have a conversation with someone else in a foreign language and get translations straight into your ears from the smart specs you’ve got on.
What is already there and what is coming soon
We’ve already seen something like this in wireless earbuds from Google, Samsung and Apple, so the idea of routing translated speech directly into your ears isn’t new – but it could be more practical than ever on a pair of XR specs.
It’s something that devices like the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 AI glasses also have on board, though it uses Meta’s own custom AI models. With the power of Google Translate, reliability and speed can hit a new high bar.
Samsung has promised that its own XR glasses will arrive at some point, while Google is also working with Magic Leap on a few specs. It looks like we’re about to be hit with a new wave of these smart glasses in the near future.
We’re not sure exactly when these features might go live in Google Translate — Android Authority also spotted upcoming options for pausing playback individually by language and playing in the background — but it should be sooner rather than later.
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