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Google Brings AI-Powered Live Translation To Meet

(Tuesday May 20, 2025 @05:20PM (msmash) from the pushing-the-limit dept.)


Google is adding AI-powered live translation to Meet, enabling participants to converse in their native languages while the system [1]automatically translates in real time with the speaker's original vocal characteristics intact. Initially launching with English-Spanish translation this week, the technology processes speech with minimal delay, preserving tone, cadence, and expressions -- creating an effect similar to professional dubbing but with the speaker's own voice, the company announced at its developer conference Tuesday.

In some testings, WSJ [2]found occasional limitations : initial sentences sometimes appear garbled before smoothing out, context-dependent words like "match" might translate imperfectly (rendered as "fight" in Spanish), and the slight delay can create confusing crosstalk with multiple participants. Google plans to extend support to Italian, German, and Portuguese in the coming weeks. The feature is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers now, with enterprise availability planned later this year. The company says that no meeting data is stored when translation is active, and conversation audio isn't used to train AI models.



[1] https://www.engadget.com/apps/google-brings-live-translation-to-meet-starting-with-spanish-174549788.html

[2] https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/google-meet-ai-translation-6a30c43a


The death of voice-actors (Score:2)

by nospam007 ( 722110 ) *

Even before the 'normal' actors.

So... (Score:2)

by Randseed ( 132501 )

Quiero Taco Bell.

Spinning up the infrastructure to replace you 100% (Score:2)

by Rujiel ( 1632063 )

I can't believe Black Mirror hasn't made an episode about all of your WFH coworkers being gradually replaced by AI Flanderizations of themselves without you noticing. The reveal is that they have deployed "seamless" replacements for in-person workers as well.

Japanese (Score:3)

by Smonster ( 2884001 )

Romance language are the low hanging fruit. Learn one and if you are good at languages and the rest are fairly simple to grasp as well. I am fluent in Portuguese. I was raised by lingual and live in both Brazil and the US growing up. And as an adult. I also and studied French for 5 years, going to France once. As a result I am about 80% fluent in Spanish too. About the same I am in French. I can read Italian pretty well but orally understand only about 50%. If it works as advertised, the tech is pretty impressive. The google translate app has done live translations in those languages reasonable well. At least well enough to understand the main points most of the time. However it is awful with Japanese. It can do words and three to five word phrases. But anything longer it is pretty much useless. My wife in Japanese and I have tried it over there years when visiting Japan. My Japanese has improved much faster than the translation software. You have to start somewhere and French, Spanish, and Portuguese covers many hundreds of millions of people. So good for them, I guess.

Re: (Score:3)

by toxonix ( 1793960 )

Japanese is very different conceptually. Literal translations don't make sense in many cases. I don't think auto-translation is any where near on par with human translation. Slavic languages are also tricky - it's the largest and most diverse language group with many sub-groups.

Re: (Score:2)

by guygo ( 894298 )

So no AI-dubbed Samurai movies?

Re: (Score:2)

by hadleyburg ( 823868 )

The most interesting aspect of translating between languages that are not closely related is not that the translation itself is difficult, but the fact that if you were part of the target culture might actually want to say something different.

Caution: Keep out of reach of children.