Google Translate Receives Live Translation, Language Learning Features In Recent Update

Abner Li reports for 9to5 Google this week Google has updated its Google Translate app with a live translation feature, as well as a new Duolingo-like language learning feature.

The real-time translation features obviously uses Gemini models.

"The new ‘Live translate’ capability lets you have a ‘back-and-forth conversation in real time with audio and on-screen translations,’” Li wrote last week in describing Google Translate’s new functionality. “After launching the new interface, select the languages you want, with 70 supported: Arabic, French, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, Tamil, and more. With a thread-based interface, Google Translate will ‘smoothly’ switch between the pairing by ‘intelligently identifying conversational pauses,’ as well as accents and intonations. Meanwhile, advanced voice and speech recognition models have been trained to isolate sounds and work in noisy, real-world environments.”

The live translation feature is available on iOS and Android to users in the United States, India, and Mexico. Google has posted a video to YouTube showing off the functionality.

From an accessibility perspective, live translation is helpful insofar as people who are visual learners—essentially, the inverse of audio versions of Google Docs—can follow along with the scrolling text in the Google Translate app as someone is speaking. The bimodal sensory input could make conversations in a foreign language more accessible both ways: linguistically and disability. What’s more, there are many neurodivergent people for whom reading a textual version of someone’s words is more accessible than aurally comprehending an unfamiliar language. Put another way, that modern smartphones are powerful enough to be able to generate real-time translations means more accessible and comprehensible conversations; a person needn’t look at a guidebook or stumble through words or use gestures, which can be socially awkward.

The same argument applies to the language learning feature in Google Translate. To wit, Google has smartly provided options for listening and speaking words, phrases, and/or sentences such that a person can choose the modality that is most accessible to them depending on their needs and learning style(s). They’re de-facto accessibility features.