Apple has just announced AirPods Pro 3 (with many other things – read everything that Apple announced during its IPhone 17 event here), and as part of the ad, it showed a new live translation feature.
It takes the speech of someone who speaks to you in another language and converts it into your own language in your ears via your airpods. You can talk and your iPhone will show what you say in their language. If two people both use AirPods, you can just speak and have the whole conversation translated.
Here is the Direct Translation Apple Demo:
To watch
Now, you could assume (as I first did) that it is an exclusive AirPods Pro 3, because Apple does not mention it to any other earpiece – but this is not the case. Apple’s language is ambiguous during the section, and watching the comparison pages for different AirPods models after the event reveals that more models will get this functionality.
More specifically, it is the AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 with Ancien who will get it. This makes sense – they both use the same H2 chip as the AirPods Pro 3, and both have an active noise cancellation, so that the buds can soothe the person’s speech in your ears and fill the translation instead.
The cheapest airpods 4 have the H2 chip, but have no active noise cancellation, they will therefore miss the functionality. And the AirPods Max have the old H1 chip, so miss this with so many other features – including other new AirPods features announced for iOS 26.
Apple says that “Live translation with Airpod works on AirPods 4 with an active noise cancellation and AirPods Pro 2 and later with the latest firmware when associated with an iPhone compatible with the Apple Intelligence 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 will arrive in four other languages by the end of the year: Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (simplified).”
If you want to see a complete overview of how all the different AirPods models compare itself for the features, here is a large list of OL ‘.
