Right around the time Apple added live language translation to its AirPods, my Spanish-speaking mother-in-law flew in to visit. The timing was perfect to put this new feature to the test. I got an A in Spanish 2 in high school, but hardly speak enough to keep up in conversation.
Live language translation, in which Siri feeds a delayed translation of what’s being said into your earbuds, works on the new AirPods Pro 3 along with last year’s AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4. You also need to have them paired to an iPhone running the latest iOS 26 software with Apple Intelligence.
My mother-in-law is bilingual and speaks English perfectly, but Spanish is her preferred language. She’ll often jump into Spanish first when speaking to my husband — and that meant this was my big moment! I would be in the dark no longer!
I just had to set the Apple Translate app on my iPhone to convert Spanish to English, but it can also translate between Portuguese, French and German. With a press of the AirPod stems, Siri was, in real time, filling me in on everything they said in Spanish.
Well, almost everything. Depending on how clearly words are spoken, or if someone is using an uncommon word, or if there is more than one person speaking — sometimes Siri gets it wrong. Very wrong. In my experience, Siri might just put swear words where they don’t belong (this happened more than once), or botch some descriptive words. And I had to be very close to their conversation for it to work.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
Apple does call it a “beta” product, so I know there are kinks to work out. But even with these flaws, this experience showed me that orange iPhones are not the most important tech story this month.
In this episode of One More Thing, which you can watch embedded above, I go into what I learned from the experience, along with my first impressions of using the new AirPods Pro 3.
I also share some tricks I learned with the latest software updates when it’s paired to an iPhone — like having the system automatically play music if it detects you’re walking, or how you can summon “Workout Buddy” peppy voices cheer you on for doing barely any activity at all.
I look forward to continued tests of the translation feature, and I’m curious to see how it compares to similar translation services from competitors like Google. But Apple doesn’t need to be perfect to make this a hit product. It will be big because AirPods are already so popular — and that means for many consumers, it will be their first experience using live language translation, no screen required.
If you’re looking for more One More Thing, subscribe to our YouTube page to catch Bridget Carey breaking down the latest Apple news and issues every Friday.
